Ah! Forty minutes to write this and I'm so tired. But knowing my incessant and utterly annoying need to stick to my word, I shall post. I will not be defeated!! Though, I regret to inform you that today, I shall only be inscribing a few brief words. I've been up hills all day long....
And I guess there are some days that are best left unsaid....
Even if I wish I could put them into words and remember every last detail.
Days so full of joy and sunlight....and friendship.
And love.
God is so good. And He is present in all of our days....though, I think He's present in a special and unique way during these unscribable days.
Why is it so hard to focus, to make myself do what I love?
I fear I'm riddled with fear.
And then I want to give up altogether and go bake a cake. Or wish for the umptienth time that I didn't have to worry about not being in full-time employment. Or go worry about something else insignificant. Or look at pretty blogs.
I realised, at about 1:00 am this morning (as you do) why so much of my journaling feels fake to me. It's cause I hide. I hide what occupies my brain the most. And most of the time, it's fears. Donald Miller mentions that Jesus commanded us over TWO HUNDRED times 'Do not fear'. And still I succumb to its paralysing voice.
So I check facebook (yup). I wonder what I'll make for dinner. I use the toilet. I doubt that I'm loved. I check my emails. I pop out to run an errand. I fritter away the hours.
My soul shrinks, my faith diffuses into thin air, and I am numbed.
And then the guilt rises, as I try to justify what I've done with my day.....that never goes over well. I chide myself and I ask, 'What SHOULD I be doing?' I try harder.
A Pen's Justification
There is a knotted thread
within my hand;
it binds my fingers together.
But my head?
It hurts for all the wool
tangled
mangled.
I try
raging
pulling
to explain, explore, the ache.
The ache of inadequacy
of confused, believed fallacy.
My perception
time and again rebuked
by a sense of duty.
Will my pen ever stop
trying to justify my being?
Do you ever try harder? To cover up, let go, sweep away, forget, to build, to create,....to justify? I look inside me for The Answer, The Meaning.
Inside me....
....and I wonder why fear seems to grip onto my heart and why I can't hear Your voice in amongst my endless babble and fretting.
Inexplicably, this morning (having woken up tense and under-slept) I finally listened to the Voice that had been whispering 'read John' for the past couple of days. And I read these verses....
'In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through Him all things were made;
without Him nothing was made
that has been made.
In Him was life
and that life was the light of men.
The Light shines in the darkness,
but the darkness has not understood
or overcome
it.'
John 1.
I can't claim to know what this means. What it means intellectually or for my own life....but I read it and my bones feel vigorous again. My heart somehow has courage. Life is seeping back into me. A fight is rising within....I will not stand idly by as the Story is ripped from my life. It will not be stolen from me. For the Light, Jesus, the Word is dwelling with me. Within us.
Challenge for myself?
Let the Word of Christ dwell RICHLY within me, and then maybe the words that spill from my own pen will feel less like a justification, less of a covering up,....and more of an act of freedom, more of a joy.
I had a pause, a breathing space, in my life this past weekend. And it was most glorious.
I've also felt challenged.....to stop letting my days pass me by as if my life was meaningless. I remember growing up, I would always pretend that I was in a story. Whether that story was in war-time Britain, bombs dropping around me, or in some Victorian field on Prince Edward Island, or in some dimly lit, religiously fraught medieval castle on a cold and wet day. Walking about in the grocery store gathering items for my mum, in the car on the way to piano lessons, or lying in bed at night....I would depart for the Other Lands.
Yes. I was an odd child.
But that's the rub. We are in a story.....and what kind of story am I in? I've been reading (devouring?) 'A Million Miles in a Thousand Years' by Don Miller. He writes, 'I like the part of the Bible that talks about God speaking the world into existence, as though everything we see and feel were sentences from His mouth, all the wet of the world His spit. I feel written. My skin feels written, and my desires feel written. My sexuality was a word spoken by God, that I would be male, and I would have brown hair and brown eyes and come from a womb. It feels literary, doesn't it, as if we are characters in books....there is a knowing I feel that guides me toward better stories, toward being a better character. I believe there is a writer outside ourselves, plotting a better story for us, interacting with us, even, and whispering a better story into our consciousness.'
Do I live this way? Sometimes it's easier to live in my head. To dream about a life I would desire....to let it slip by me unnoticed, like a beautiful flower growing in the crack of an old stone wall. I think we get scared, and it paralyzes our dreams and desires, our passions....and ultimately our very selves.
When I think of one thing that scares me, almost above all others....it's being vulnerable in writing. It's so easy to go and read someone else's blog, someone else's book. Instead of picking up the pen myself.
So this week, I'm going to try something. I am going to attempt to put some writing on the page every day this week. And see what happens. I guess it's like a muscle. Like training for a race you've always wanted to do, actually finding that recipe and making that loaf of bread, like opening that box of photos and beginning to fashion them into a story on a page.
