Behind all this time and sand

When I read through Numbers this year, the ways in which the people complained hit me hard. They had been rescued from slavery and they were complaining about things like not having the right kind of food, or that maybe God was just leading them into the wilderness to kill them all more dramatically.

For over a year now, that has been me. I pay lip service to the sovereignty of God, but I have a hard time pushing that down to contentment. Instead, I still deeply mourn the loss of my father, and the deaths of dreams that followed his death. I mourn my life as I thought it was going to happen. I mourn the personal failures in the things I have said and done. I look around me and I see wilderness stretching as far as the eye can see.

(I have needed corrective eyewear since I was six. I can't see all that far.)

I haven't wanted to blog much. I don't want to spiral into self-pity, and I have been in more or less of a mental fog since mid-May of 2010, so writing has been more difficult. But maybe it is useful to shine a light on the demons that plague you, and then to turn that light onto the map to remind yourself that on the other side of the wilderness is the Promised Land.

Lately, my clearest dreams have been nightmares, violent, kill-or-be-killed. In trying to go back to sleep after one of those a few weeks ago, I looked it in the face first. It boiled down to Suzanne Vs. The World--I have always tended to feel like I have to have my own back, and the feeling has only increased with my dad gone. And I realized that such dreams presented a false dichotomy, two options when there was at least one more: 1) kill, 2) be killed, 3) let somebody else take care of the pursuing villain. I'm not good at killing the villain, anyway; the villain never actually dies at my hand. (Oh, my Lord and God, you are the one who has to do the slaying.)

And maybe the villains will be shaken off, or maybe they will be thorns in the flesh for the rest of my life. Even so, one way or another, one day I will be clear of them.

Someday, I will look back on my early 30's and think, "Oh, that wasn't so bad after all" or at least "Look, there were good things that came out of that time." Even if it isn't until Heaven. The challenge now is to embrace a White Queen sort of memory, or rather a New Testament sort of memory, and remember things that happen years from now better than this very moment itself.

Unimaginably great things have not yet--but already--happened.