Tonight I walked into my house and felt overwhelmed. I had been shuffling in the mall, whose hallways and speakers have ALREADY been adorned with “Christmas”… the outward colors of it without any inward depth. I had to squinch my ears to tell if I really was hearing the instrumental song that I thought I was… but it became undeniably clear the moment I saw the most unhappy Santa I have ever seen. There was a photographer; enormous, red, shiny Christmas ornaments; rolls of carpet moving in various directions for lines that would wrap around and around.
But there were no lines; only a Santa who was more than likely musing about skeletons and pumpkins, and a Persian man that said I am going-k to change your li-fe today…this cream! We vill get all the pimps off your face, it will change your life. All the pimps. Yes, that’s what he said.
I returned home to my beautiful girls, but conversation quickly turned to the one that is part of my daily life right now: I seem to have been having long weeks of the same conversation, dropped by one person, continued with another in my life, taken on by several others, dwindled and taken up again by someone that has noticed the same thing my heart has. It began over dinner with my pastor’s family. We somehow got to speaking about men in their 20’s and 30’s, in and out of our church, and Pastor Tommy said we should pray. There is this struggle, this fight, this dropping away of the men I knew that were committed to Christ, and a dearth of ones that are freshly arriving to Him, heart in hands. So we spoke more of praying for the men that let commitment and the forward-fight dribble between their fingers’ grasp; for the boys that have no idea what being a man should look like, and for the women that haven’t seen an example of anything but settling for this.
Then Rachel un-paused a video-teaching they were about to watch and the first words out of the speaker’s mouth were about The Beginning, and he began by breaking down the name Elohim. Break to the only response to emotionally-charged-stimuli that I seem to currently have on tap—a spasmodic visceral reaction: I fled the room.
It felt involuntary, an instant response— I couldn’t stay. The man said Elohim, and jumped into parts of the word, the root, the meaning. And it hurt. Ache. Want. The feeling that my heart would gut itself if I listened just now, tied, I guess, to the study of words, and God, and Hebrew, and Greek. Then instant repulsion at the dramatic nature of those emotions (oy-ve!!), annoyance that the ache makes me hostile, anger that I don’t know what to do with my heart.
I think I’m just tired, but it ends up coming out as a garbled, toe-crunching “rawr”. I would so much rather embrace what I long for—or the waiting for it—and not rush out of the room because of something stinging and poignant. I just felt a little sad. And hated that it comes on the heels of others’ joy. It’s all the change again: my wonderful childhood best friend gets married in 6 days, and in moments of weakness it feeds into the questions of what I’ve screwed up that keeps me from having what God has given to others. What have I done or been that is so irreversible? I feel like I’ve been longing and seeking, and allowing necessary separation… and still ache, distance, faint mimicries of emptiness.
And none of this is fair questioning, and I know this. I hate feeling consumed with lack; lack that my spirit, without false filters and worldly schematics laid over it, knows is not there, or knows that the vessel part, the decaying, unlasting part of me insists on identifying…conjuring.
Bleh. There it is. But out where its sting, or shame at such emotions, can dissipate, and out where the seeming-truth of some of those statements can be illuminated, shown for the shadows they are.
And then replaced. Replaced by the truth of blessing. Blessing in the form of roommates that have been abundant sources of “laughter like breaking dishes”, wisdom, and commiseration. Blessing in the form of joy in welling-up moments spent in my car. Blessing in the view down the hill in the morning mist.
There are some beautiful events in the last few weeks that I need to come back and mention; sights and company that have made my heart burst!—only tonight the other feelings usurped my attention first, so here they sit. My apologies~ :)
Posted on 3 November 2008 at 10:53 PM Comments (1)
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