God,
Amidst the multitude of growing troubles that have arisen as the waters over my head: progressively weighing on my mind, vexing my soul, and perpetually pressing in like shards of accumulating glass in my once child-like soul, I feel compelled as a final resort to attempt to write down some of the current results of these matters to try and respectfully talk with You in a way I feel most ineffaceably heard. I intend to shoot from the hip, as to say most of what I feel led to, and so apologize in advance for any redundancy; yet by these means I might have the confidence that they were said in a manner more tangible than simply continuing to circle in my head as the ravenous vultures they are- as though these consuming fears, worries, regrets, and disappointments are not just as obvious to You as the literal condors overhead, eagerly awaiting my demise. Yet I know as it often does, that the day will come that there are so many ineffably hardest learned lessons and concepts trapped within my succumbing spirit that I’ll wish I had found a more concrete way of communicating them than wishfully continuing to hope that You perceive my every faded inward thought, feeling, and inclination. I truly fear That I’ve been fighting in vain the point at which I will sink into silence; that all the passions that once enlivened my mortal body, spirit, and soul will become obsolete. So I wanted to write as much as I could formulate together, now. For it seems there is no better time that will feel the right time- fragmented as it may be in light of my continually insatiable desire to feel known, understood, touched, or felt; yet I know no matter how much I say it will likely never feel to do justice to the knowledge of a no longer merely proverbial weight of this world.
I have found myself finally having been pushed over the cliff’s edge I’ve been precariously skirting for years, yet continually spared from by Your good graces. I am struggling to overcome the perpetual feeling of being trapped in the midst of days that feel like a nightmare I keep hoping I’ll simply wake from, and in never doing so conclude that there will be no mortal return from this harrowing precipice of both unbecoming and becoming so many things I swore I would never lose, nor become. You might be able to appropriately deem me much like the character of “Most Afraid”, of Hinds Feet On High Placed, for I have since been filled with a strange type of disinhibited courage ever fraught with a profoundly deep and conflicting fear, and I am indeed afraid of all the ways the last years’ events and it’s ensuing silence have unavoidably been changing me. Admittedly and violently, tooth and nail I fought these changes until the simultaneous cataclysm of ensuing events became so devastatingly overwhelming that to stand was to break my bones. And I did. Like the strong and stubborn, often incorrigibly wild spirit You partly crafted me of, or a horse that would run itself to death if it were to believe it could somehow escape gravity or the grave. My spirit has finally been irremediably broken, as I have been warring this for years, and finally seemingly been defeated in silence. I find it is in this silence that some of the most catastrophic wars against spirit and morale are eternally fought or lost in endless succession- and yet there is no wholeness of peace in the stillness of surrender, and no peace without losing a war. In fact, from my current vantage, there is no peace at all in this life; for I was surely born to either fight all the way or be defeated on terms of which I’m not decided whose yet it will be.
At the seeming end of all these matters,
I partly wish now only to erase it all- to take the now supposed answers and absolutely discard most of them in order to unknow and return to being the person I was before circumstances caused me to lose my grip on what I had believed was the life I was working to make and the person I desired to be: a refined redemption of all that was grown and painfully crafted in the wandering of the desert places of my bitterest mistakes so far from any promised land. Yet I have fallen and been dashed to pieces upon the rocks of the testing of the faithless at Kadesh Barnea, and the weight of my shame at failing You once more can no longer be ever relieved by assurance of any remaining sands in an immovable hourglass. The punishment I’d wager for my ignorant disbelief was to wander for many years alone in a land of seemingly no other souls, but Your presence often so tangibly with me, has felt more real than any other person in my life for most of it’s duration. In not understanding, I certainly have wondered and been afraid for most of this way- despite Your faithful leading- but I have never felt half as anxious and confused as I now find myself in understanding. Previous to this turn of events, I have run with either an unabating endurance or foolish denial- yet of which, I’m not certain I want to know. Perhaps deep down I have hoped for a kind of hope that simply doesn’t exist, and hope does not feel as hopeful as I had always thought, nor peace any longer as peaceful. For at the end of this decade- plus length journey, all my searching begs that it may be more beneficial to the mind of disquietude to suffer the perpetual uneasiness of not knowing, rather than to seek the answers to the ubiquitous questions of existence, free will, and Your dealings with us. I have felt deeply compelled to extensively ponder and seek these things, and presently arrive at a most lowly landing place of trepidation and confusion between accepting the fate of the answers I currently consider at the end of all my failings, or to continue to seek and search in possibly foolish optimism that my breakthrough is just around the corner. Which is what I had always told myself in my tireless persistence in all things.
Some often so discourteously recite that the subjectively relevant end of your life is usually the metaphorical beginning, but I had armed myself for war during the years of desert wandering and tried to hold faith that I had managed to solidify a steely enough fortitude in my projected plans for the future. However, In this recent most unexpected season it seems from my current perspective and experience that all of this has tragically come crashing down in a most unexpected way of the illest timing imaginable, and of a nature seemingly so precise and extensive that it becomes increasingly impossible to attribute to mere coincidence- as opposed to a purposefully orchestrated conspiring of either divine or demonic affliction, or I am the world’s biggest fool. But there are simply too many moving pieces that have all come together in such a way as to produce a massive change in all my beliefs, psyche, personality, and conviction of who I am at my core. Twenty- nine years of such certitude seem to have all somehow been shaken and Transmuted, such that on the dawn of 30, I don’t know what I believe anymore. It has all seemed as though no amount of willpower could have resisted or turned back the absolute devastation that swept through so suddenly and unexpectedly, like a hurricane leaving nothing but shambles of what was in its unforgiving wake.
In my mind, heart, and soul this war has been waging as though a type of proverbial final battle, back and forth for many months in resisting it’s pull, until as if almost overnight: everything in my world changed.
It seems not a single hair on my head nor part of my life or self have gone undamaged or unchanged in the period of this last season. Many of these changes have left me devastated: at the deepest heart of who I have always been, decided to be, and labored for countless years in order to maintain any place of peace and faith inside. I have held on and fought the rising tides with more than I had to give, and in the midst of seemingly insurmountable anxieties, find I am finally unable to live or conduct myself in such a way consistent with the maintenance of a heart that in foolish granted, I had always thought impossible to irreparably destroy it’s tenacious spirit within me. This is unfortunately the case at this present time, and amidst the unfamiliarity and painful strangeness now of every part of life, it’s difficult not to think this to be the same inevitable end of any passionate pursuit under the same tiring sun. Yet I have to confess that at the end of this Journey, this too finds me
surprisingly, profoundly disappointed.
While I am well aware that plans rarely go as we would most ideally have them, and life will never be perfect nor easy, I can’t help but be tempted to question You and most everything I have so unwaveringly believed about Your workings and relationships toward us. I am doubting in things I have so firmly maintained since I was too young to even recognize the concept of conscious belief or identify the timeframe of its forming within me. The one thing I always knew since there was any knowledge to be had, was that You were with me. Though our human memories are spotty and tend to be rewritten with time, from my present point in time it could feel as though my awareness of Your omnipresence was either instilled from birth or simply there from the onset of self- awareness’ age of development.
Furthermore, I must have trusted You so much more deeply than I could have yet realized- for I knew nothing else- until it was shattered in the breaking light of reality and a level of sadness and devastation I never could have believed one could feel and still breathe; I never thought you could lose your heart and have it still beat or believed that I could ever truly die long before my body was put in the ground.
Perhaps I give myself too much credit, but maybe my innate belief that You were always with me Is contributory as to why I typically had a formerly great confidence about me, and rarely remember feeling marked loneliness throughout life- or at least not the type of loneliness that I believed could be filled by any person. I felt so sure that You have been there for every moment of my life: every breath, every whispered doubting word inside, The countless moments no one will ever see, and every exultation of hope or imagination fulfilled to affirm Your guiding hand in my life or word in my ear. Even in a great number of the trivial details of life, there are many things that I might be too hesitant to share with people who could so easily believe me to be delusional, or water the seeds of doubt formerly hidden to my eyes, that shamefully nonetheless have sprung up and now are dominating the garden of my desecrated heart. My doubts have birthed from fear: the fear that I imagined it all and there is no making sense or redeeming the end of my strength, fear that I have always been alone, fear that I now walk until the end without any of the sustaining hopes of Kadesh in my heart; Fear that the comforting words and continual guidance with the tender understanding of my mortal fears and haunts, was an exhaustively complex grand fabrication of my imagination and God could never humor me so personally, as I am one grain of sand on the shore of over 100 billion faces having passed through this same broken world, of which I feel more a likeness to with every passing day.
I have been unable to eradicate the roots of doubt taking hold, of potentially how overwrought and grandiose these detailed observations presently feel to be. Here in my present state, with seemingly nearly all of the pieces of my life, peace, hopes or dreams lying again shattered on the ground and my fists bloodied in anger, my pride and dignity have been brought low by a force I can neither explain nor identify, but could not seem to effectively resist- though I tried with all I had left. I have to confess that in light of everything I have believed since I was a child, and with everything I’ve seen, that it has become nearly impossible not to be tempted to turn in question or blame. I know I have blamed you, and I have blamed myself. I have been full of rage and anger at myself, too scared until now to admit that my anger is at both of us. I have tasted and seen, being well aware that we live in a fallen world. But Your sovereignty and control in the minutiae of the universe, in light of Your simultaneous presence on both sides, is not a mutually exclusive statement with living in a fallen world. I had always believed Your ability to work in spite of and within these fractures exemplified your infinite understanding of every detail of every situation as well as it’s complex interconnections with the overlapping webs of other’s seemingly unrelated situations and how they will respond. I now question this. I am doubting that You fully understand the degree of reactivity in my heart, spirit, and soul in angst and ceaseless conflict. I question the complex theories I had formed from taking meticulous note in my heart of Your orchestration in the past and it’s fruits into the present. Did I overthink or over- imagine the ways of a God who said He could do more than we ask or imagine? Do You not perceive or incline the hearts of some men to flow as a river in the way that they should go? Did I not pray these very words? Did I so utterly fail You that Your will could be usurped by a left turn as opposed to a right? Did I miss the final sign? Am I simply too ill- minded and stubborn to accept a fate so grim as to be hinging upon merely my own diminishing strength? Have You been my help, shelter, and strength all these years or was I simply still young enough to get away relatively unscathed of my own small might?
These cumulatively compiled yet unwritten treatises kept in my soul regarding how I have always experienced You, have long been all I have held onto inside- amidst the unseen highest highs and these unforeseeable darkest times. These now lie as myths potentially shattered and possibly irreparably singed in my mind, now with consequently little to hope for in this life But the same to be as has always been before- for there is indeed nothing new under the Sun, much as I may have tirelessly searched for it.
Now caught in the midst of the most unsettling season of life, I find my heart sorrowfully caught between the teeth of a world that seems to only be revealing itself as even worse than I had speculated, And I’m trying to make sense of such commonplace devastations in light of my formerly naive candor.
Most religious or spiritual advice offers simply one or the other: the viewpoint that things do not work out or bad things happen because we live in a fallen world and You will sometimes work to the endpoint of a simple exercise or lesson, *or* You are so much more intimately acquainted with the labyrinthine reactions and repercussions prior to and following the bad things that You choose not to intercept (or You allow) And this understanding would be to a degree so high above our human asking or imagination, that I would need not doubt its redeeming qualities. The first theory on using it as the means by which a life can utterly fail or be cut off premature despite all best efforts, could imply that there are things in the universe outside not only Your control, but also the control of the human afflicted by whatever circumstance. Is there anything beyond Your control? Which would mean You were not all powerful within the bounds You have set to limit Yourself from intervening with human free will or nature ticking as the clock.
I guess in some unadvertised way deep in the recesses of my heart I still hoped that by some miracle of Yours, I would figure things out and end up okay, or that somehow my turnaround just hadn’t come yet. I thought You were that big.
I fought all this way- through thousands and thousands of bad days- and I believed You would have done something miraculous in my life by now, to show that You are a brilliant story writer and not just trying to put bandaids on hopeless situations.
Yet If you can do more than we ask or imagine, then why should any yet-uninhibited imagination be of any challenge to the true nature of Your workings? Is anything too hard for You?
Is any imagination too lofty for You?
Are you ever caught off guard or surprised? I guess I actually am.
Ultimately, I wonder If Your will can be usurped by human frailty, decision, or miscalculation (because of free will in a broken world) , this gives me very little to have any of my former hope or peace in this life on the basis of. I wish You had given me a bit less free will. I prayed You would incline the direction of my heart like You carve the rivers paths into the Earth’s face or the tributaries that ever flow back to the ocean. Since I was old enough to speak I ran to You, and I have always run back to You.
To where else will I now go?
I have seen Your hand ever present and involved in nearly every iota of this world and I had speculated even the universe- save for that I have never been there. In my mind there has always been nothing You couldn’t do: no soul being too far gone or singular perspective beyond Your comprehension in a way that implies personal investment and a degree of excruciating symbiosis in the endless alleviation of human suffering.
I have been tempted enough to have thought throughout my life that despite my insatiably restless spirit and continual straying, that Your spirit in me at times could seem almost one and the same,
but then remember the nature of my sin and self- seeking ways. Regularly thoughout my many tumultuous years I have been gifted with Your gentle presence and an ever present longstanding dialogue inside of which my simply contrived thoughts and the strategic language in which You presented Your words was in such a manner that they could sometimes be difficult to tell apart.
I had always believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that the fire deep within me that always guided and strengthened me- growing and diminishing but never entirely extinguishing- that it was You by my side, feeling what I felt, and guiding me back to a place where I felt safe. I never thought that fire could die. I never could have believed a day would come I could not hear You.
Yet I am beyond petrified to witness what I thought would cease as only cracks in my faith and beliefs, rapidly erupt into a full- blown fracture and falling away from You and everything I’ve known and been shaped into. I’m terrified to be witness to feeling separated from You for the first time, as though deep in my soul I am desperately clawing through the dirt to try and reach the places I used to feel Your presence in a way that felt clean and uninhibited, but now countless hands keep pulling me further down under the mud; for these days I always feel I am a terrible type of tainted and unclean that never washes off.
I believed that if I tried my best and did what I thought was the next right step in my life with the strength that I had, while continually praying for your guidance, that I would get where I was ultimately meant to be. I did not necessarily believe in fate or destiny apart from Your mysterious hands leading, guiding, strengthening and protecting those whom You called Your own. I can recall a passage of Psalm 139 stating:
“Your eyes saw my unformed substance;
In Your book we’re written, every one of them,
The days that we’re formed for me,
When as yet there were none of them.”
I guess I messed it all up.
I wish so desperately I could say that today I still so firmly believed in this interpretation, or that I no longer feel devastated by terror clouding my ability to see a worthy plot in life or a redemption that eradicates the multiplying torments gnawing inside and growing measures of disappointment. I could ask You if you had truly planned my life, and if it were so, perhaps I could feel some peace again. But if I ruined everything and missed Your plan for my life, I could never forgive myself, so I’m too terrified to ask You that question. Couldn’t You see my mistakes coming before I was ever ever even a concept in my mother’s heart? Seven years ago I could never have begun to grasp the magnitude of the weight of the world I feel today in relation to a lifetime of seemingly waiting for redemption or for something to make sense or feel clear to me amidst the chaotic, confusing, heart- wrenching mess of being another broken human being of finite strength. And I am devastated. And I know I’m not the only one. I have never felt nearly so utterly weak and distressed in all my days upon this earth or so frightfully disoriented and tossed about on the tumultuous seas of a new kind of confusion, of which must be only compounded by the relentlessly opportunistic oppression of demons that seem to never cease returning whenever I have been at my most weary. Frightening enough as it is that they have nearly won this time, but what scares me most is this cavernous hole I’ve still managed to sense expanding amidst the numbness within until it has finally fractured the junctions That have all my life held me together as surety of who You are, or who I was created to be; it’s been dividing my mind, spirit, body, and soul to be at continual conflict and war with one another and sometimes it can feel, with You. Desperately, I come to You in pieces, for the first time terrified You won’t be able to put me back together. When my prayers in the day grew weary, I began calling out for You in my sleep, in which I have been experiencing recurring nightmares of worsening intensity. In such dream I have fallen some place deep within the earth and no one can hear me, or even knows I’m there. My body is dangling over a bottomless cavernous pit and my hand is slipping from the only small handhold left to grab in this claustrophobic chasm of which the walls on each side and above are slick with the sickening muck of a sewer cellar, and closing in as I’m screaming Your name until I wake myself up from yelling myself hoarse and death-gripping the headboard. I have never before doubted my faith in You who had ever been my help and comfort. Yet here I am, feeling so terrifyingly far away from You and everything I’ve ever Known that always seemed so sure, far past a shadow of a doubt and unable to save myself from these darker shadows that seem to have come back again in this season.
What seems a journey I have long been on in search of answers I thought I desired, I now wish I could erase recollection of in return for the measure of peace I wasn’t even aware I had previously until these present days befell that it wasn’t there in the same degree. I wish so desperately I could erase the entire last year from my mind and efface it’s marks in my soul. I want so desperately to feel that same familiar relief deep inside, To be able to come to you and leave feeling renewed, strengthened, or filled with a familiar fire; for a while now no such comfort or rest do I find. You’ve always been the shelter that I’ve run to in the hard times and the better times too, and I find myself confused and distant because, quite plainly, You’ve never not rescued me. You’ve never not met me. I have waited, prayed, and persisted in doing all of the things I don’t want to do, long left my comfort zone, sought more help, and took more advice than ever in my life, only to end up so much worse than ever before. And some of these people want to act like they understand me, my life, or what’s been going on better than I do. In all this humiliating help-seeking I hoped that my fire, resolve, or direction would be somehow inevitably renewed as it always was previously.
But for what seems the absolute first time, this has not happened.
The fire has gone out for the very first time.
And it hasn’t come back.
I have blamed myself for every possible wrong turn and step I can even think of, I have changed myself according to what I was told I should be until I don’t even like me anymore, and I have examined myself solely and mercilessly to find the fault for which I failed. And I am so very sorrowful for my failures, despite all that I had to learn the hard way. I don’t know what I missed in having been taken by waves beyond my capacity to cope.
I have been tossed about in every direction, as though every way in which I am pointed that would seem to be of Your guiding, turns out to be another dead end. I’ve never experienced not having any inner compass before, or such silently excruciating and sorrowful depths of apathy. I’ve never felt so alone and I never could have fathomed I could ever become become capable of numbing myself in all the ways I now seem to be achieving in exchange for parts of myself, and barring myself from everything that once seemed worth keeping.
Yet it is unfortunately often discovered that with the progression of time this very specific temporary state of the transcendent joy of being unencumbered in Your presence is hampered by the burdens and heart breaking disappointments of life; call it the seeds sewn among thorns or cast by the wayside, but I am ashamed to say that this has finally become the case of where I find myself. I guess I simply lasted longer in my blinded faith than most. The heart that I used to so eagerly bring to You to sit in Your presence and have my cares lifted, passions illuminated, and strength of conviction renewed, for the first time in my existence on this earth has begun to feel the unsettling beginnings of callousness. These changes I’ve noticed possess the tendency to be so insidiously subtle yet progressive that I can see how some might not even notice it’s workings within, until the time comes too little And late to fully reclaim the innocence and idealistic enthusiasm that most people inevitably And progressively compromise along the way; for I find oftentimes even if it can be relived or imitated in a moment, it is mostly through the bias of a memory that tends to change over time as well.
Periodically, sudden and unexpected revelations of the past evoke a renewed awareness of these cumulative changes within myself, and I wonder when did existing stop being enough incentive to keep those feelings?
I long assumed that most other people in the world saw or felt similarly as I, or that their hearts were the same and felt things as deeply as mine always had, until lately. It was only In speaking to a greater number and spending more time with people than ever previously in my life, that I more firmly conjecture that most of us reach a nearly definitive point in life at which we consciously or unconsciously begin to to numb the painful feelings of the things we can’t control, at the partial expense of dulling and chipping away at the highs. Even being fully cognizant of this: Now, when I’m not breaking things or fucking up life evidently by trying too hard, I’m numbing myself for the first time too. In fact, it scares the life out of me that “I’ve become numb to everyone and everything and I’ve finally given up in life for the very first time”, and that was part of the clearest things You’ve ever said to me in my life. it’s been destroying and dismantling everything I am, and despite recognizing that, I swear I never could have seen these days coming, and have yet to be able to turn it around this time as every tool and weapon in my arsenal have failed me. As much as I’ve continued to pray and tried to reach You the way I always did in the past, my prayers have grown weary, as has my faith and I, beneath the crushing weight of all these mysterious ill- events and changes I cannot account for.
And even *if* I have only myself to blame, after having experienced those many moments of being on high places alone with You, I have been cut down and descended to abysmal lows I could never have foreseen to immediately ensue those fleeting but promising, dreaming days. In fact, I could never have believed that I would ever find myself in such a humiliating and humbling low, of which redemption seems suddenly an underwhelming word in light of all that has transpired within, been learned, and rendered a deeply indelible and scarred groove in my mind and spirit. I have now seen where the roots of bitterness and anger grow and have resided in the hearts of man, and ultimately also ended up residing in mine; for it was beneath the soil, yet to spring forth from the tumultuous rains of the changing seasons to come. For I feel my heart has consequently finally grown colder than I ever would have believed it could be. And though I tried as hard as I could, I am so bitterly sorry that a thousand sorry’s could never say enough. For I believed the sky would fall before I could ever lose my faith in You.
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