How are you? What is going to happen? Are you okay? What do you need?
I don't know.
I guess I was a bit addicted to answers. To figuring things out. To working out the redemption and seeing the good and the end. It's an empty feeling, being devoid of any knowing of the way to walk through uncertainty and pain of this magnitude.
I think maybe my answer-seeking cripples me sometimes.
Yesterday, I sat cross-legged in the center of my favorite giant tree stump and tried to feel where God is in this whole thing. I followed the light filtering through the trees and all the shifting hues of color and all the other ways God usually finds me and my crashing dissonance starts to harmonize and I start to work out a sense of good in the world and balance it with the reasons my head aches from crying. I couldn't get anywhere.
I know the theology. I firmly believe that God is complete Love and Beauty and Life Abundant. I can see that all this suffering and chaos is not of His causing. It's clear to me that the enemy is stealing, killing, and destroying, using people and events to mar whatever good he can reach. I know and have seen that God has always been working overtime to restore and redeem, but none of this patched anything for me this time. I couldn't arrive at any conclusion I could rest in, knowing that THIS time, again, God can make something good. How can He do that when the last bits of good in an already-broken story are the bits being ground to dust?
I don't know.
And it scares me.
I was looking at the light again, absently wondering why I felt so estranged from it and unable to reach it with my being, when I remembered telling Ryan all the things that had me tense and worried. How he repeated over and over until I relaxed and let it be my greater reality: I love you.
And the color-tinted trees, the lines of the branches reaching their fingers to the bottomless blue, the evening light-beams reaching down to the green underneath, alive with whole communities of chipmunks, birds, and bugs... In ALL of it, I felt God say the same thing in a voice too deep for the ears.
I love you.
I love you.
I love you.
And that is my greatest reality.
6 comments:
Oh Becca, this makes me cry. I know. In these last 6 weeks I've experienced some of the deepest pain I have ever known. And during the tears that don't stop, I've heard that voice too deep for the ears. It is the sometimes the only thing I have to hold on to, the only thing that is certain. I love you!
This is perfect.
Kayla
I'm so sorry, Becca.
Thanks for finding words for what you're feeling. We love you too.
This = grace.
It was as if you stepped inside my head, looked around, saw my thoughts, and smiled in recognition.
Initially, the intricate simplicity of this post left me incapable of response.
I only knew that you managed to capture what I've been trying to sort out. That it was true. And that I never want to forget it.
Just wow... and your heart is stunningly beautiful...
-Sherilyn
This is beautiful! I so can relate to wanting to have the answers and feeling empty when I can't. Its in those times I really find out just how deep my faith in God is. Thanks for sharing!
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