Day 15

I got out of bed this morning which means I’m already doing better than yesterday. Although by the time I showered and ate breakfast I was already tired. This feeling weak and helpless is something wholly new to me. I’m so used to being strong, bucking up and pushing through, making things happen. But this time I can’t. As a friend pointed out to me, I’ve lived most my life caring for the needs of others, but in this season it’s a good day if I can manage to take care of myself. Which is hard living in a house with ten other women, some of whom I’m very aware are hurting and needy as well. But it’s my turn to let the needs of others go and learn to give voice to my own. It’s healthy, I’m told.

I’m sure this weakness is going to change me. It’s going to have a purpose. I have to believe that or else what’s the point of pressing on? I’m coming to the end of myself in a way I’ve never had to face before, which means the Lord is going to have to make Himself strong to me in a way I’ve never been able to let Him before. And maybe that’s the point. Or compassion. I’ve been so judgmental of others before, thinking, just get up and get out of bed. Go to work. Go to class. Don’t let it be an option. Just do the responsible thing. Grow up. And now here I am growing backwards, growing young, unable to be an ‘adult’ in the typical sense of the word. But somewhere in this topsy turvy kingdom, does that mean I am growing up after all?

Last night I finally worked up the courage to try and encounter the Lord. I was scared, and I told Him that. Because either I didn’t hear His voice correctly in the first place and then how can I know I’ll hear Him correctly now? Or, I did hear Him right and He intentionally led me into this season and put my heart in this place where He knew it would be broken. I’m growing to believe it’s the latter that’s true. He was patient with me. He understood my anger, my pain. He cried with me. He told me the time to face answers to my questions was not now. And that was comforting, at least a little. It was good to be on speaking terms again. And yet when I asked Him if all this pain of opening up my heart to be vulnerable and then having it exposed was necessary, He said that it was. And at the same time He carved the word KINDNESS into the trunk of the redwood tree in which we were sitting. He said, I have been kind to you.

Really? Somewhere down deep I know I will come to believe Him, trust Him again. But right now it doesn’t feel like kindness. It feels cruel. And I am left grappling with finding a way to put these two truths together, like pieces from two completely separate puzzles:

My heart is in so much pain.

The Lord is kind.

I feel exposed, betrayed, left helpless and physically aching from my broken heart.

The Lord has been kind, specifically, to me.

“The more we believe that God hurts only to heal, the less we can believe that there is any use in begging for tenderness. A cruel man might be bribed—might grow tired of his vile sport—might have a temporary fit of mercy, as alcoholics have fits of sobriety. But supposed that what you are up against is a surgeon whose intentions are wholly good. The kinder and more conscientious he is, the more inexorably he will go on cutting. If he yielded to your entreaties, if he stopped before the operation was complete, all the pain up to that point would have been useless. But is it credible that such extremities of torture should be necessary for us? Well, take your choice. The tortures occur. If they are unnecessary, then there is no God or a bad one. If there is a good God, then these tortures are necessary. For no even moderately good Being could possibly inflict or permit them if they weren’t.” –C.S. Lewis from A Grief Observed