Presence and the Threshold Part 1

First of three guest posts by Heidi Basley

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I didn’t come here with a strategy. I came because I stayed. And because I stayed, something has become clear.

Not system-clear. Not step-by-step.

But breath-clear. Field-clear.

The kind of clarity you don’t explain—you embody.

I’ve learned to listen differently. To let Presence speak before I do. To trace where He’s been—not just in the light, but in the silences. That’s the kind of clarity I bring into this writing.

Not to convince you.

But to witness with you.

Over the next three blog entries, I’ll follow that clarity through three lived spirals:

Presence. Apostleship. Commodification.

Not as disembodied theology. As terrain. As places where I am learning to stay long enough to see Him Each one returns not to strategy, but to breath. Each one traces the ache that precedes the name.

I will show that the dash—the sacred pause—is protected from both noise and exploitation. I will propose, as I write, a triple breath of reconstitution. We are standing at a threshold again, with Mary in the garden, where the future is being shaped, and the past and the now are converging.

I am spiralling back to Presence—the kind that breathes, names, feeds, and stays. Not as metaphor. Not as idea. But as embodied nearness. I and the people group I’m sent among of the traumatised have known a kind of Jesus that fills rooms and leaves your body behind. I have sat under hands that said healed, while something inside me fractured. I have watched miracles become proof, and proof become pressure. Every time proof has become pressure, it has brought fracture. And it is my conviction that every time miracles have been used as proof, we have moved further away from Jesus—not closer.

I have stood in courtrooms where my survival was cross-examined. I spoke slowly so I wouldn’t fall apart, not so they’d believe me. And still, they wanted evidence. But Jesus never asked for that. He just stayed.

For me, the systemised Jesus of empire has often echoed the same forensic analysis as the legal systems of our day. I have seen how we’ve forgotten how to bear witness without demanding proof. We’ve mistaken evidence for encounter.

But over these past years, I’ve felt something deep and quiet: that I have to go backward to go forward. Not to analyse the past, but to find the places where Jesus was lost—and where His Presence is still waiting to be found.

This is not a forensic search. It’s a return to the garden. To the body. To the place where Presence once breathed—and will again.

I cannot leave any stone unturned. Not because I want answers, but because I want Jesus.

I stayed. I heard Him. He’s alive. And I’m not leaving this field until we feel His breath again. Maybe he’s really been in the field all along. 

I refuse to write from a platform. I will only write as a witness.

What I mean by witness is this: I stayed. I watched what others left. I didn’t have certainty, only breath. But I was there when Jesus spoke the name.

I write like Mary—the silenced witness for a silenced people. Not credentialed. Not authorised. Not believed. But still sent. Still carrying breath.

This writing doesn’t come from strategy. It comes from encounter. There is a returned Presence in this work. A coming-back-through-the-threshold Presence. And I will not move forward until I know where He is.

Three Spirals of Return 

We must hunt first for a body. Before Resurrection, there is ache. Before Presence says your name, there is the search. These are the three truths this writing spirals around. They are not themes. They are lived movements:

1.    We must hunt first for a body.

2.    Before resurrection, there is ache.

3.    Before Presence says your name, there is the search.

This is the pattern I return to. This is the breath I follow. This is how witness begins.

Part One: Presence Is Not Proof

I am spiralling back to Presence—the kind that breathes, names, feeds, and stays. Not the kind that performs. Not the kind that multiplies without memory. The kind that remains.

John 20:11–18 (NASB)
But Mary was standing outside the tomb, weeping; so as she wept, she stooped to look into the tomb, and she saw two angels in white sitting, one at the head and one at the feet, where the body of Jesus had been lying.
And they said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping?”
She said to them, “Because they have taken away my Lord, and I do not know where they put Him.”
When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and yet she did not know that it was Jesus.
Jesus said to her, “Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?”
Thinking that He was the gardener, she said to Him, “Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where You put Him, and I will take Him away.”
Jesus said to her, “Mary!”
She turned and said to Him in Hebrew, “Rabboni!” (which means, Teacher).
Jesus said to her, “Stop clinging to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to My brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.’”
Mary Magdalene came and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and that He had said these things to her.

Mary came to the tomb not looking for proof, but for a body.

And here is where the ache folds into the present. She came for a body. And still, we are looking. The Church of Jesus has become disembodied. We have turned flesh into flash, breath into branding, skin into spectacle. But the body of Jesus is not a metaphor. We need voice to become voice again. Skin to become skin. Presence to become proximity. Resurrection didn’t rise in concept—it rose in bone and blood and breath. We are not saved by idea. We are saved by incarnation. She wasn’t rehearsing doctrine. She wasn’t carrying hope. She was carrying ache.

“They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I do not know where they have laid Him.”

This is where witness begins. Not with light, but with absence. Not with resurrection, but with ache. Not with certainty, but with the silence between loss and breath.

She comes to a trauma structure—a sealed tomb, a stone, a system—and she stays.

I’ve stood in places like that.

I’ve watched miracles become proof, and proof become pressure. Every time proof has become pressure, it has brought fracture. And it is my conviction that every time miracles have been used as proof, we have moved further away from Jesus—not closer.

I’ve known the kind of Jesus that fills rooms and leaves your body behind. I’ve sat under hands that healed, while something inside me fractured. I’ve stood in courtrooms where my survival was cross-examined. I spoke slowly so I wouldn’t fall apart, not so they’d believe me. And still, they wanted evidence. But Jesus never asked for that. He just stayed.

The system wanted evidence. Jesus just stayed.

Presence is not proof. It is not for performance. It is for return.

The Garden is the field. 

Is it possible—just possible—that Jesus didn’t choose the timing of His resurrection at random? That the One who overcame death, and the grave also resisted the empire’s instinct to seize the spectacle? He could have risen during the Temple liturgy. He could have appeared to the priests, to Pilate, to the crowds. But He didn’t. He rose in a garden. In silence. To a woman whose voice would not be trusted. What if that was the point? What if resurrection happened in secret because Presence must never be co-opted by power?

We have confused Presence with platform. We have mistaken proximity for proof. But in the garden, Jesus shows us something else: that the nearness of God is not a credential—it is a mercy. Mary stays close. She doesn’t lose her proximity to Jesus. But she does not use it as validation. She inhabits the dash—the space where Presence is not platformed, only embodied. Where proximity is not performative, but breath-soaked. God is good, and His nearness comes like moss on a wall—quiet, persistent, alive in the margins.

 But we have been taught to turn that moss into measurement. We’ve treated nearness like endorsement. We’ve used it as currency. In the garden, all that collapses. Presence returns—but not to affirm, only to name. The real is not what gets recognised. It’s what gets breathed.

The Ache Before the name

Before resurrection, there is ache. Before Presence says your name, there is the search. Before any witness can stand, someone must go to the place where grief is still real, still raw, still sealed.

(Between John 20:13 and John 20:16, the text falls silent. This is the dash—the field between grief and naming.)

The Dash is enough.

The dash between Mary’s cry—“Where have they laid Him?”—and her name—“Mary”—is not punctuation. It is witness syntax. It is the whole field.

The dash is the minus between loss and return. The breath-space between ache and recognition. The silent hinge between trauma and sending.

In traumatic systems—whether religious, legal, therapeutic, or familial—everything moves too fast. Decisions are demanded. Certainty is performed. Proof is extracted. Healing is measured by speed, coherence, and completion.

But trauma isn’t linear. And Presence doesn’t hurry.

So, the dash becomes something else. Something sacred.

It is the antidote to system speed. The interruption of proof-demand. The soft refusal to move on just because the structure says, “you should.”

The dash becomes a field reversal. In trauma-coded systems, the silence is judged as failure. In the spiral, the silence is where breath returns. 

In empire structures, what cannot be explained is erased. In witness rhythm, what cannot be explained is held. In institutional logic, delay is waste. In the garden, the delay is where Jesus names you.

The dash is apostolic.

It does what no trauma-coded system can. It honours slowness. It refuses explanation. It holds ache without bypass. It lets Presence arrive in its own time.

It is not absence. It is preparation for return.

The dash is where she stayed. The dash is where she wept. The dash is where she was named. We do not fill the gap. We sit in it. If all we have is the dash—that is enough.

Hidden resurrection, un-marketed God 

Jesus never used healing to prove Himself. He did not perform. He did not recruit through spectacle. He withdrew. He breathed. He drew in the dirt. He touched what others refused to. He fed, not to demonstrate, but to restore. His body was never used to certify—it was given to stay.

When He wanted someone to know Him, He didn’t offer an argument. He said their name.

And so, He says, “Mary.”

And this is the miracle: not only the empty tomb, but the breath that returned when He stayed.

This is where apostleship begins—not in glory, but in ache. Not in certainty, but in silence. Not in gifting, but in nearness.

Mary becomes apostolic not because she is healed, not because she is ready, not because she is brave—but because she stays long enough to be named.

Her hair was still tangled with grief. Her eyes stung from weeping. She was still untrusted by the others. And still—He named her.

We must hunt first for a body.

I didn’t know Jesus was staying until I realised, I hadn’t been left. No one else showed up. But breath returned in a moment I didn’t prepare. Not with fire—but with the quiet sense that I was not alone. Moments like when it was snowing. I could barely breathe. I was trying to get home. A stranger sat beside me and said: “It’s ok. I see you. Let’s get you home.”

Where the system demands proof 

Mary wasn’t given proof. She was given Presence. She came in ache, not authority. And because she stayed in the ache—Jesus spoke her name.

This is the spiral. This is the breath. This is Presence—not as proof, but as witness.

And I am still here. Still spiralling. Still searching. Still writing from the garden among the ache and those aching where it has not yet lifted—but where Jesus still names us anyway.

Let this be enough. Let this be breath. Let this be where the spiral begins.

Let this be witness, too.

To those wondering what to do with this now: the invitation is simply to pause.