Tonight I am feeling the weight of loss. Asking myself to hold my chin up feels as if someone suggested that I dig a huge hole in the center of my heart, fill it with sand and light a cheap birthday candle. "There," my armchair therapist might then say, "warm yourself, your emotions, with that. And, oh, by the way, a sub-freezing, Antarctic-style wind is about to blow through there. But you'll be ok. Just ask Norman Vincent Peale."
Truth be told, any consolation feels about that effective long about now. I am shell-shocked by recent developments with people I hold dearer to my heart than life itself. I can do nothing to help or to save them and so I am feeling adrift in a WIDE OPEN ocean of sorrow. I can see no end to the dark gray, wind-whipped waters. My raft is a shard from the boat of "WHAT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE." The life I imagined was a beautiful houseboat and I am holding one small, ragged board. My dreams for my future, as relates to these loved ones, is dead and dark, at least in light of the current season. The current season, for that matter, could be classed as a never-ending night at the movies...gothic horror, that is.
I cannot see an end to the pain. While I can see a place of peace looming as close as my bed upstairs where I will curl into a ball and ask God for sleep, the pain will be in my shoes as I slide them on in the morning. It will knife me from every corner of every day for some time. It will rise and fall as I watch other people enjoy milestones, revel in their own family normalcy. It's not to be for me. Not in the future that I can see from here. There is no island of comfort, at least not from the standpoint of circumstance, in my line of vision. I'm trying. I'm looking. When a soggy wave lifts me up I strain for the shore, but I don't see one yet.
If you think I don't have faith, you're very wrong. I'm just being real. Because being real is the first step toward accepting what I can actually change and what is far, far beyond my control. Accepting what I can control and working to do that, is another step toward healing. And every step will bring me closer to Christ, although pain has a way of driving me into His arms like nothing else ever, ever does or could.
Other people's choices are like ships that ram us, roll over us, threaten to make us extinct. Our own choices are, however, far more powerful. One choice in particular. The choice to submit to God. He will never leave us. His Word is firm on that point. If I thought I had to look at this situation without that certain knowledge, my strength would utterly fail and I would not attempt a walk to the finish line. I did ask Him today, whimpered a plea, that, like King David, I could see His goodness in the land of the living. Meaning that I could see something good happen on this old fallen earth. Something that would lift my spirits so that I won't lose heart, as David suggested would have happened if he had not believed that he would see God's goodness here, in the midst of our earthly affairs. I know that my soul does prosper, and it will be as healthy as I allow God to make it. What I need is an earthly, tangible sign that He sees me and He cares about the practical and even the things that are passing away but touch us so strongly now. Stay tuned. I know He will and I will share!
No comments:
Post a Comment