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.