Attacks - 1-30-10

The enemy has been attacking me lately, saddening me with memories and confusing me with my honest, godly intentions. And as I sink in this confusion, this blurring of focus, the effect ripples. My focus hones in on my own needs and my sight and slides off those who desperately need my prayers.

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I knew this was happening over the last week or so, but it took me a while to see the ultimate truth: this is indeed the enemy, although I give very little airtime to him, and he is able to sneak through my many defenses to get not only to me, but to all those I cover with faith. It’s a terrific deal for him if he can get to the source.

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But then I realized that the Holy Spirit in me is indeed stronger than the enemy that is out there in the world. And he didn’t wander into me. He didn’t stumble into my soul and blink, looking around owlishly, saying, “How did I get here?” I am intentional. I am his purpose. He has purposes for me. I am not here to founder, to worry and despair and finally sink. I am here to comfort, guide, and protect. He has done mighty things in me, made himself recognizable to others so that they actually seek my prayers, instinctively knowing that I will do so effectively, with faith bearing up on the hard-won lessons of my life to hold the truth out in my hand.

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As Jehosaphat said, this army is too strong for me, but my eyes are on the Lord. He will fight this battle for me and give this victory, this important day, into my hands. The Lord will deliver me to my purpose.

Cut Of The Same Cloth - 1-25-10

We are the same, he and I, cut of the same cloth. God sewed him together a year before me, then spread out the same bolt to trace my shape. We are the same, he and I.

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Should the unthinkable happen and what I do not dare speak comes to pass and God prepares his heart for me, I will have a unique position, a place of credibility that I believe none other has. One of his biggest struggles is having faith. One can understand why. He and I came to adulthood climbing questions and analysis to get to who we are. Our natures are the same – they can sacrifice everything before the “hows” and the “whys.” And I know him, like I know my own self: he will waste so much of his life over-thinking and over-planning and over-analyzing and ultimately missing out on so much of the brave, scary wonder of it all.

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I thought I would never be free. Never have rest from all the “what-ifs” and terror of taking the first step of a journey whose end was shaded from my view. And the unthinkable happened: God actually worked. He did everything he promised in the most effective and surprisingly efficient way possible. And I found peace. In all the unknowns, I had rest. He soothed my frantic brain. Such a thing was not to be possible. Yet it was done.

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He whose name I speak with care is of the same ilk, plagued and blessed with the same restless inclinations. And if our story should actually not end in mist and silence, he would have before him every day a vision of himself, freed. For that is what I am: a version of himself.

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He colored me with such saturation because I was already shades of those colors. He was blue-green; I was green-blue. We were two sides of the same coin. And my dearest prayer is that he finds the fullness of God. That he finally sees with open eyes what his potential looks like loosed.

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No one can be so credible a testimony to him as me. With anyone else, he would murmur to himself, as I have done so many times, “That’s nice, but it’s different for them. They’re not like me. I’m a more complicated customer to fit.” But he would relate to me. He knows how like him I am. It is in large part the reason I have been so incomprehensibly alone for 30 years. He knows how I struggled with the faith any love requires before it is truly love. He knows the scars I bear were not just from a job I hated, but from the calcifying belief that I would always be alone, that I was somehow too damaged to love or be loved. He could not throw out such a blithe yet sincere dismissal to me. He would see how I have changed from when he first met me, see the peace I wear like a cloak and the wisdom I speak after months of single-mindedly seeking it, and he would find his own arguments and self-preservation stymied, or at least stifled by the credibility I bear.

Oh God, the God of My Soul - 1-16-10

Oh, God, the God of my soul, to you alone I bow. I bow low before you, utterly humbled by this great work you have done in me. You have overcome my own fallible nature to make me purely love you; you have given me an undivided heart. To you goes all the glory as you use me to bless those I love. You give me wisdom where there was blindness and love where there was anger. You have revealed and saved and proclaimed. You teach me what is best for me and show me the way I should go. Your glory is ever clearer in me; you give me the honor of illustrating your nature, your incomparable essence. You make no mistake with my life; your eye is ever on my end.

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As I love you better, so too is my love for B____ R____ M____ refined. As I love him, I love you more purely. So strange that those two loves are two sides of the same coin.

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But I do not claim him. I have loved him stubbornly, but to you go the first-fruits of my stubbornness. I am stubborn that I will not lay claim to him, will not call him by any title. I lay before you with an open, joyful, focused, and peaceful heart my Isaac. My dearest love and most precious possession, hands off and head bowed, and say to you to take him away and bless him all the days of his life. I do not give him to you expecting him back, as Abraham was rewarded – that is not the nature of Isaac. I give him to you with the full force of my love covering him and my eyes on your face, your praise filling my mouth.

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To no one else would I entrust this precious thing, this precious man, this precious love. But I know that you will do right by him. You will bless him by my love. My faith will justify him and he is in the best of hands. Take him from my heart, O God, and bring him only closer to you.

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Bless him at every turn, keep him and make your face shine upon him. Give him wisdom straight from your head, which is undiluted inspiration. Show him your glory and use him to do such good. I pray God if he be for me, keep him pure for me alone, and if not, bring him nothing less than a woman who will only bring him closer to you, who will inspire him to see you more clearly. Bring him a woman who won’t take his crap, who will see him as clearly as I see him and always believe in him. Prepare his heart for you and her that he may show your glory as I do.

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You have saved me from the craggy shadow of death, have stayed my own hand for your glory. I bless my scars, my weaknesses for they brought me to my knees before you. You are great and ever merciful and righteous and faithful to save. O God, my heart is full of love and peace and such satisfaction in you. I forget not all your benefits. To you goes all the praise for this great good thing that has been done in me. You have given me an instructed tongue by your Spirit to speak the word that sustains the weary. You have made me a blessing to those around me as I have asked, and I am on my knees before you, utterly abased and humbled that you should purify me so there are no more barriers between us so that my prayers may be the most effective and do the most good possible for my beloveds.

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My mother and my father and my Isaac are my most precious and honored ones, and I pray unceasingly and with great faith and joy for their every happiness, that you would bring them all good things and fulfill their desires with good things so their youth is renewed like the eagles.

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All praise and honor to the God of all for these marvelous things you have wrought in me. No stubbornness can outlast you. You are Wonderful Counselor, who teaches me the way I should go, Mighty God, who vindicates me and uses me for his glory, Everlasting Father, who never forsakes me, and Prince of Peace, who shores up my faith and trust so I might have peace that passes all understanding.

To My Child - 1-13-10

To my child:

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You may come to a place in your life – you may have already been there a while – where the magnitude or the multitude of your mistakes seems overwhelming or at least daunting. You may feel shame at those mistakes made or even helplessness in making them, that you were somehow always destined to fail so miserably. You may even believe those mistakes are past all redemption, that you can never come back from them. That all lenses others look through to see you have been indelibly tinted with your inadequacy and you will always be judged wanting.

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The danger, I have found, in this dark, churning thought process is the point where you feel alone. Where you know you desperately need help but which will not come because you are invisible. Lost. Left.

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It is a lie, my love. I promise with every wound I have sustained and every scar that marks me, that there is a God. That his eye is ever on your form. That he has engraved you on the palm of his hand. That he has plans for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.

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I have been in that dark place, so deeply in the dark I couldn’t see the truth from the lies in the gloom that crusted in my eyes. I have thought, “My mistakes are too much. I will never be able to come back from them. All my efforts have come to nothing but shame.”

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Do you know the one thing that turned everything around? I fell in love. But that is not the Thing that changed everything. Oh, it was big. It was everything I had imagined for 30 years and no longer believed existed. But what that did, interestingly, was thrust me into God’s presence. There was so much uncertainty in that time, so much heartache blended in with the wonder of it all, that I was faced with my own inadequacy to navigate these foreign waters. Falling in love was the catalyst for my utter helplessness before God. I knew, despite the many years of difficulty understanding God amidst my endless questioning, that the only one who knew the way through this maze to the future I envisioned for myself was God. He was the only one who knew which step my foot should take at each turn. I knew it. I knew it all the way through me. This was far too important for me to risk screwing it up because I was too proud to see my complete incompetence.

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And that whole process led me to understand the most important truth I have ever known. When all was dark and swirling madly around me, I asked for the one thing I knew would make it possible for me to keep to the path that would lead me to my future. And that was wisdom.

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The previous year had been the worst year of my life to date. Basically, except for my health, every area of my life had imploded. And in my utter misery and despair and hopelessness I had made many mistakes, chipped away with my own hands at my precious, carefully honed reputation. But it wasn’t until my heart was on the line that my pride cracked and I acknowledged I needed God. In that whole year, I had prayed for many things; wept for them: help, deliverance, escape, peace, you name it. But, despite seeking wisdom in some form or another all my life, taking to heart all the sermons about its worth, I had somehow managed to forget to ask for wisdom. That whole year. Not once. And the year just kept getting worse. Until, my heart breaking, I turned to God and asked for wisdom. I didn’t ask for anything else for myself. Just wisdom to guide my footsteps so I could get through this and learn from it. And it became a habit to ask for wisdom first and last.

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This habit extended to all areas of my life, including work. And as the following year began, I began asking for love as well as wisdom. I knew as I faced another year in an unchanged situation, wisdom would give me everything I needed. Help when that was what I needed, blessing in my endeavors, good words in any situation, patience with my students. Wisdom is the panacea for all ills, and I was facing many of them.

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And as I continued asking for wisdom and love, I found another truth I had never realized before. Wisdom and love are two sides of the same coin. Perfect wisdom is perfect love; perfect love is perfect wisdom. And if you have God’s love in your heart, you will have wisdom in every word, every action, every venture.

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And lo and behold, I found that all that I had believed irredeemable was steadily redeemed. My reputation became solid again. My name had become a blessing, not a byword anymore. I had everything I needed in wisdom and God was faithful to save, even mistakes I thought too dire to be fixed.

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You will, sooner or later, struggle with feelings of being a failure. You will feel too far gone, too imperfectly made, too human and flawed. It is the nature of this life. But greater is he that is in you than he that is in the world. He will be faithful to save, to rescue, to redeem because of his name’s sake, because he promised to do so, promised to answer those who call, and he cannot renege on his promises. He will give you wisdom, no exceptions, when you ask for it with a sincere heart, because that is the most worthy prayer. The most pleasing prayer because it is only with wisdom that one can see God’s nature and understand that we need him.

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Ask for wisdom. Whenever you are unsure, ask for wisdom. Ask and believe, and you will receive. Count on it.

Pain - 1-9-10

I am in a womb of pain. I am surrounded, engulfed by a muffled world where I am alone and in the dark. It is truly breathtaking, squeezing each breath out of me with a python’s inexorable strength. I know one cannot die of such pain, but that is what I feel inside: death. It is a familiar feeling I did not at one time expect to feel this particular year. 2009 was going to be my year, but with the blindingly bright exception of a handful of weeks, it has been a year of nothing but the worst torment. I feel as though sooner or later, I will implode, crushed finally by the endless pressure in my chest.

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My heart has not broken. No, that is far too neat and simple. I have been shattered, a hole blown out of my chest by an atom bomb concentrated in the shrinking hollow of my ribcage. I am blown apart. I am limbs flung away, scattered in the ashes.

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I never knew – I never knew that emotional agony could have an actual physical pain. It literally feels as if my chest has a jagged hole, as if I am dying from the inside out. In all my other seasons of pain, there was never a physical correlation. But now . . . I know it. I have knowledge from the tree of life. And I do not know how I shall recover.

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How do you survive the memories? That is where the pain comes from, this awesome, bottomless maw yawning below me. It’s the memories of how it was for so brief a time.

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And such anger! Like Tourette’s, it bursts from my lips when I am alone and doing random tasks. The curses I bite back so I will acquit myself well and not make myself a liar. But the anger only lasted for a few days and now I am merely flotsam carried on the tide of this agony, this torture. I have indeed grown up, indeed been made tougher. I do not complain, I do not talk of it. I simply curl inwards and am struck silent at the awesome implacability of this pain. And it will go on. I do not see an end to it in sight.

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I am in pieces. I cannot feel God, although my faith has also been made tougher and I still know the truth. But nothing shields me from this pain, not even God.

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Why should he not come back? Surely he cannot but feel conviction at the ways he failed me in his own weakness and fear, even if I was a rebound. There were just so many ways we matched, so many astounding small miracles that seemed like the flagstones of confirmation upon which to stand. But did none of it mean anything to him? Did he remember none of it, that he should so blithely go off with this woman whose name I will not speak but which rattles in my brain? How could she not pale in comparison to me, especially now that he knows everything, including what I could not say, in that perfect letter? How could he not have responded to such a letter? Did it not reach him? God would not have done so. Not only did I deserve for him to know the full extent of his choice, but he deserved it, too. He deserved to know the truth, the beauty and the pain of full disclosure, complete revelation, for the good it will always do him. But who has received such a letter? And who could repay such love as one does not find in this world with silence? Was I wrong about him? And will he truly never come back? Will I truly never see him again? Such a thing overtaxes my mental faculties. I cannot think of it because it is such an ignominious end to it all. Truly? All of this woman, all of this refined love, wasted? For all the good knowing him did me, I still cannot think there wasn’t flagrant wastefulness that I never even got a real try, that all of that love, rarer than snow in Egypt in its quality, should be shut out by a locked door. What is God playing at? This shakes so many life-long-held beliefs I had about life. I had always held to a certain innate justice to life, that you got out what you put in, but I do not believe this is justice, for all the improvements and newly-minted strength I find in myself. For this to be the end, the true end? For that letter merely to have been my last-ditch attempt at closure, and nothing more? For nothing to have come of it all? The idea staggers me. Or it would if I wasn’t already on my knees.

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I am so tired all the time. No matter how much sleep I get, no matter how well I eat or how many vitamins I take, I am still exhausted. I am tired physically, tired emotionally, tired mentally, tired spiritually. I do not hunger and I do not eat. But I paint my face expertly to hide the shadows, and dress smartly, and speak softly and patiently, and smile gently, and open my hands to help where I’m needed. I am able to shut my mouth against complaint and ask for wisdom instead. How ironic that he made me strong enough to bear the loss of him. That was his whole purpose and mine in knowing him. Someday the irony of life will kill me.

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But what am I to do as I’m stretched on the rack? Nowhere to go from the pain? That which I so feared back in June is, indeed, as bad as I feared. One of the few times in life, actually, when the reality outperforms the anticipation of it. I never envisioned, even then, just how cutting the pain would be, just how messy my wounds. Funny that reality surpasses anticipation mainly in the bad things.

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God, 2009 sucked. Worst year of my life, the school year of 2008-2009. And I thought it would be over when I met him, but here I am, 6 months and counting from those glorious, revoltingly brief days and all those months were just to teach me a lesson? What? That I’m destined always to be disappointed in love, one way or another?

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And he truly can forget me?