I posted this first in 2004, and it seems truer now than maybe even when I first wrote it. As more and more loss has come into my life, and grief is overwhelming me currently. I don’t have anything in the least bit useful to say, and feel paralyzed by grief. So are reposting this in the absence of having anything useful to say currently.
Today’s been hard, well it started last nite, I slept about two hours all told and except for that two hours have now been awake around 36 hours. And the rivers of tears have rolled on, and today have seemed a river and a half. My eyes are so swollen plus lack of sleep I can’t open them properly.
Have been thinking about truth. Its the one thing that never changes. An old truth is as true today as it was thousands of years before. A fact doesn’t suddenly become only half a fact. Yet there are many questions that accompany my rivers that will never have an answer. Sometimes I can feel literally in hell in my body, and feel under God’s most tender care He so fills me. I know at those times I need nothing more than that. No one or nothing could improve on that inner peace, the song that seems to set your heart aglow with love for the creator. But we all have shifting days. Days that seemed one way yesterday may not seem the same today. You wonder how you can believe any of it is good, when the rivers of tears are all there is, and every minute just to be alive feels torturous. And yet, truth never changes. But it does seem to become foggy or blurred, in the midst of anguish in which pops up doubts and fears and all kinds of longings, that the day or two before, when you felt filled by God, those tears and doubts and fears and longings were a million miles away. King David used to be in most anguish of spirit when he felt God was distant from him. And sometimes I read Psalm 22 and how Davids sorrow at the time was for a short while, but The Man of Sorrows sorrows were unto death. And I know that’s my lot barring a miracle. And I know that sorrow to some degree. Where not a moment at times is lived without feeling pierced, and bruised, where the longing for relief is your souls desire. And you almost feel with the pain and inner tumult that you too are sweating blood, because of of the pain that comes from your soul. And yet the truth never changes. But how to make the truth permanent and fully cognizant and a reality in the depths of anguish and confusion, is something I’m nowhere near. And I know I can’t:
Job 23: 6Will he plead against me with his great power? No; but he would put strength in me.
I’ve had multiple people say to me in recent months that I am more alive than many believers with much fewer burdens, and yet, sometimes part of me feels dead, and I mourn that loss. Sometimes if someone says they miss me if for some reason I’m gone, I say, I miss me too sometimes. As I don’t know this person, who can feel so grief stricken, I never knew grief like this existed. And after living thru nitemare after nitemare since the year dot, they were one set of griefs, but this is quite something else. I miss the eternal optimist who could always make a joke out of a bad situation, who would laugh as others wept for her, and yes, sometimes I see shadows of the same person, but the streams of emotions forever pouring in different directions, in an instant the laughter can turn to weeping and visa versa, and the echoes of the soul feels storm tossed on the ever alternating streams of emotions, and the person that you were once, seems a distant memory. God says we are new creations in Him. Put off the old and put on the new. Yet at times the new can be so painful.
"I’d rather die with grace than live with blame,
Far better to die with love, than live with shame." Roger Drake
<
