Breaking and Burning

This weekend my mom was in the hospital. She's out now, but it was a rough weekend. Yesterday when I got back in to work, I was exhausted and emotionally fragile.

The big thing that kept me breaking into tears at intervals throughout the morning was that people kept asking me how I was doing, and how my mom was doing, and meaning it. This afternoon, two coworker-friends who have been keeping tabs on me closely since Sunday came in and sat in my office, which they had never done before. A voice inside my head said, "You don't have to keep checking on me. I'm not broken." And then another voice said, "Yes. I am."

Laurie R. King writes of a woman who has been carrying a weight of grief and snaps, completely breaks down in front of someone she was trying to look good for. In looking back on the incident, the woman says that "[he] had seen me in that despicable state and burnt me with his compassion." That's how I feel when people keep coming, even when I have nothing to give them.

I hate being burnt. I hate being broken. Tonight at prayer meeting, I thought of this verse: "As for these things which you are looking at, the days will come in which there will not be left one stone upon another which will not be torn down" (Luke 21:6). I feel like that's me, like one stone after another is being knocked over. Part of me grieves that, but part of me is waiting to see what I will be afterwards (1 John 3:2).

When my dad was in the hospital, I felt like I was doing really well, really praying it out of the park and exercising faith like nobody's business. When my mom was in the hospital, my internal prayer went more like, "God, I have no idea what you're doing. I don't even know what to say to you right now. I'm a little afraid of you, and a little angry about this, and I just don't know." But that's a prayer the Spirit translates (Rom. 8:26).

I have nothing. But everything.

"For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in jars of clay, to show that the surpassing power belongs to God and not to us."~~2 Corinthians 4:6-7

The more chips there are in a jar of clay, the more worn out it is with use, the more what is inside of it is revealed. So I want to stop trying to seal the broken places, trying to distract everybody from seeing them, trying to pretend they aren't there. I want people to see that light.

"The Lord is near to the brokenhearted

And saves those who are crushed in spirit."

~~ Psalm 34:18

"How are you?"

Tonight our associate pastor preached on how Christians should pursue honesty, even in the answering of socially conventional questions like "How are you?"

I've always had trouble with that question. It's always been much too complicated to answer. And on Sundays, it's even harder. It's not that I'm trying to hide so much as that I feel too confused by the transition-between-weeks nature of Sundays to be able to answer "How are you?" with any clarity. Especially on Sunday nights, when my brain has started to process what I need to do in the week ahead, I am likely to stare at you blankly if you ask how I am.

Also, "missing my dad" will be a given for any answer to that question for the rest of my life. Even if the rest of the answer is "really excited/happy," I'll still be wishing Dad could be part of it, too. But who wants to hear that all the time? That's not new or fun. And although lately I've been missing him more, for several reasons, there have already been and there will be more times when missing him isn't something I'll be distraught about. It'll just be there, a reality to live with. (C.S. Lewis aptly compared the death of a close loved one to the amputation of a leg.)

There's some good stuff coming up this week. The completion of my giant work project that took up last week; visits with friends; my mom coming to town and in to work with me (I know one boy there who is looking forward to this about as much as I am); possibly bringing Apollo it to work for show-and-tell of sorts; seeing a play.... I'm looking forward to it. It should be a good week. I miss my dad.

(When I was with him in the hospital, I would tell him that even though he might be wishing I would stop talking for a minute, I was just going to keep talking to him until he was able to talk back to me. When I see him next, I should keep that promise. No matter how much I have stored up to tell him by then.)

Pressed, but not crushed. That's how I am.

Crying in the darkness

Words stick in my head even if they aren't set to music, looping over and over, especially when they seem relevant to my current situation. This afternoon on my way home, these were the words on repeat: "You have removed lover and friend far from me."

It is the penultimate line of Psalm 88, the bleakest song in the whole book of songs.

"You have removed lover and friend far from me." Not circumstance. Not fate. You. You, the God I have been serving all of these years. You, the One I love above all, deny me other loves. You have removed my dad far from me. You are slow, as some count slowness, to come to the aid of children I have grown to love. You confound me, in more than one sense of the word.

God doesn't sweep in at the end of the psalm to deny any of it. Not His agency, not the pain of the supplicant. In fact, elsewhere He confirms it: "When disaster comes to a city, has not the Lord caused it?" (Amos 3:6); "The One forming light and creating darkness, causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the Lord who does all these" (Isaiah 45:7).

And in case that should be mistaken for an Old Testament God-of-wrath thing, centuries later Jesus confirms that "In the world you have tribulation" (from John 16:33, NASB), which is translated in other versions as "you will have tribulation" (ESV) and "you will have trouble" (NIV). Will. For certain. And God is sovereign.

I love God for standing while the psalmist pours out the darkness of his heart at His feet, and I love Jesus for not saying, "In the world you have tribulation, but keep smiling."

Instead, He says, "In the world you have tribulation, but take courage ["take heart" (ESV); "take heart!" (NIV)]; I have overcome the world." He gives us a reason to keep going, while not discounting the pain. He tells us that this world is a place of tension: tribulation and the victory of Christ coexisting.

The psalmist of Psalm 88 isn't forgetting the victory. The psalm that ends "You have removed lover and friend far from me; my acquaintances are in darkness" begins "O Lord, the God of my salvation, I have cried out by day and in the night before You."

And I am not forgetting the victory. It is because of the victory that I can be sure that when I cry in the darkness, there is somebody who hears.

O Lord, "my soul has had enough troubles" (Psalm 88:3a).