hiding

There are days when I just want to stand under the hot water of the shower for hours, hiding on the other side of the crappy yellow shower curtain, not speaking to anyone all day.

There are nights when I can't fall asleep because I am too full of thoughts...and whispered voices that draw me in. That moment where reality and fantasy no longer have boundaries and they fuse together snowflakes melting on my breath.

I don't know why. I don't have an explanation for the moments when I just want to burst into tears. I don't have an answer for the questions I ask myself.

Ah, but here is the tricky thing: I know the answers.

But sometimes I don't believe them.

Darkness falls and stars shine brightly for all to see. Everything closes in on me and I become someone - something - else. I can be anyone...and I can be nothing.

Do you ever just want to sit and stare at the world for a while? Does it ever cross your mind that maybe you've been moving to much, and it's time you stopped? Do you ever wish you could step out of your own skin for just a moment and wander in the world doing nothing but seeing and breathing?

Remember. That's a big word for me lately.

Remember who God is. Remember that the best is yet to come. Remember that this, too, shall pass.

Remember that I don't have to know that answers to survive.

God is good. 
Therefore, it is well with my soul.

Struggle Bus

I just want to tell people, "Hey, what you're seeing here isn't the whole story. This girl who laughs and plays all day and slips into a novel after work...she has an evil twin that rarely comes out to play. But she's there." Sometimes I just don't understand why people think it's so easy to come into my life and they want to be my friends. Don't get me wrong, I love my friends. Forever. With all I've got. But I wonder sometimes if they know what they're looking at when they see me.

For the past month or so, I've been saying that I'm on the struggle bus. It's kind of a joke between me and myself (talk about an inside joke). I've been on the struggle bus so long that I furthered the joke: I'm now the driver of the Struggle Bus. It's a means of travel, and if you want to come along for the ride, just let me know.

Being on the struggle bus for me means that I somehow manage to scramble through life, get things done, and be social -- only at an awkwardly slow pace. That usual involves many setbacks. 

I don't know why it seems to be a theme in my life right now. But it's pretty entertaining. Because really, it helps me laugh at myself. And laugh at the mud puddles and crappy French fries and broken power lines in this world. 

That moment when I'm carrying a hot tray of bread and I drop a baguette on the floor. Or I go to say, "Have a nice day," to a customer and it comes out, "Have won-goo-nice da...night..." and they basically walked away before I got past the word have. Trying to do laundry and getting interrupted and finishing it a whopping three days later.

It's the little things in life.

Picking up a random book at a bookstore and absolutely loving it, but then running out of time to read it and knowing that I don't have time to read it before I move and it's too expensive to buy. Staring at a roomful of stuff and knowing that I need to pack it but being unable to get myself to do so.

All of this stuff is petty, really. I think it's stemming from the spiritual chasm running through my core right now. I seem to be going forward (if forward is the right word), and I know that my relationship with God is getting stronger and stronger every day.

But the thing that keeps getting me is this: I constantly love the darkness and crave the light. Constantly.

It makes me sick inside to realize this about myself. And to know that I am deeply, irrevocably lost in this without a way out. I cannot physically escape this state. If God doesn't come down and change this within me, I will be stuck in it forever.

I feel like I am going forward deeper into the light.

But almost every day I run into a wall of darkness and I slip right through it and into the other side almost effortlessly.

And I listen to Demons by Imagine Dragons on repeat...

Does anyone feel this chasm? Does anyone know how to heal it? Because so far bandaids aren't working, and I'm starting to wonder if I'm not letting God heal it.

Decayed Soul

        The mask.

        The ploy.

                          The lie.

             The fanciful whim.

 The act of utter rebellion.

                How they terrify me. And how they fascinate me, too. They make me shudder – in fear – and recoil – in disgust – and take notice – in inquisitiveness. But you do not fear something that you cannot imagine. You do not fear something that has no root dangling in truth. These things wrought in the darkness are twisted versions of the light.

                And they are symbols, exaggerated versions, of what we really are inside.

                It is hideous to picture the soul in all of its worst moments. The mouth snarling in rage, the eyes darkened with hate, the selfish hands pleading innocent, the lazy frame waxing to nothingness, the pages and pages we could fill will all the human failures and diseases and sins.

                But what it is even more hideous is to think of these things as being not only possible but real. For Christ has made it clear that we are born into sin. That means that our souls are being eaten alive with sin. That means that though we may not all be murderers, thieves, and adulterers, we have all had thoughts to do those things…and that is just the same.

             You may not be following me. It is all concept, trailing thoughts, strange emotions rising to the surface when night coats the world and only the stars can see what is below. All revolving around a movie I just watched. 

              But haven't you felt it before?? Oh the depths of wickedness! How deep the darkness becomes! When once the feet tread upon that path, it winds swiftly to their demise.

              I am trembling at the thought. How very near the edge I could be. I shy away at the sight of this supremely ugly vision, my very insides cringing away from this ghastly business.

  We have all been seduced by the Music of the Night.

  We all wear the face of one unchanged by our deeds.

  We dare not paint a Portrait of ourselves, even for ourselves to look at.

       

               

This sounds horrible. Worse than horrible. Isn’t this depressing? Isn’t it completely detrimental to think of this, to let myself be drawn aside to look at the darkness?

Perhaps it is.

Yet I want to understand something, something I thought that perhaps I could never grasp. Growing up in a homeschooling, Christian home, there were a lot of things I didn’t see. Much of the world that I never knew. I was protected…innocent. I always thought of myself as a Christian – long before I even knew what that meant.

So when I grew (quite recently) to understand the riches of grace in God, the freedom in Christ, the beauty in the relationship with Him, I felt as if all I knew was rose petals and sugar water. I didn’t know what I was being saved from…only that this was better than anything I’d tasted before.

For me to look the darkness square in the eyes and see how easily I am that – could be that – is horrific. And I’ve never seen it before. Death has nothing to do with breathing our last breath. Death has everything to do with decay, inside and out.

This sudden and terrifying realization of darkness and sin and a life full of death is…I can’t quite say what it is. It’s not what I expected. I’m sure it won’t be the last time that I look past the flesh we wear and see a glimpse of soul that is darker than a pit.

Yet swirling past and in and out of this darkness is truth. Truth that my heart can grasp like a lifeline, rest upon like a rock in a desert of swirling sands:

The darkness is not to be feared.

Fear is not something that the light knows.

Rather, darkness fears the light, and draws away from it.

So, my soul, do not despair. Look into this darkness and see the hollowness of its eyes and remind it that it is only a shadow leftover from the light. That is has power, oh yes, but that there is a greater power, a power that I - even I, a nobody fluttering around in the midst of earth - I have access to.

"Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, thought he may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die. Do you believe this?’ " John 11:25-26