Your pain has changed me
your dream inspires
your face a memory
your hope a fire
your courage asks me what I’m afraid of
(what I am made of)
and what I know of love.
– Sara Groves, “I Saw What I Saw“
Pain changes us.
A co-worker lost her dad last week. She’s going to be changed. I’m still waxing and waning with my own messes, as I have been for the past stretch of years. I don’t even bother wasting guilt on whether the pain I feel can compare to another’s, for we are all different and bear our burdens to the best of our ability.
Not knowing where I belong. Feeling like a spectator to the kind of life everyone else seems to have found, somewhere outside looking in. Aloneness. If anything I’ve done matters. What my purpose in life is, in both the larger picture and in the here and now. My lack of hope and small faith and exhaustion from years of prayers that just don’t seem to make it past the ceiling. The very large gap between what I know and what I’m feeling and living. If I’ll make it to the end, even if I am crawling across the finish line.
This life is difficult.
We can choose how it will change us. Sometimes I have decided on anger, and all I could admit to was being angry. Any benefit is lost in the anger and whatever it is that God is trying to change in me has to be attempted again because I wouldn’t hear. Right now, all I can say is that I got nuthin’. There’s not much left to say to anyone. I’m all talked out, even in my writing. There’s nothing I can say, no new revelations, no new proof. And in trying to lift this burden to someone else to have them help me carry it, I know that there’s nothing I haven’t heard, no scripture or admonishment to buck up, no empathy, no sympathy, not one thing — nothing. I’m almost to the point where I can finally ask for nothing else but Jesus.
Life is difficult. Hope is a fire, burning, giving warmth and causing damage.
How I live a moment is how I live a day is how I live a life, the writer Philip Yancey said; I read that with a sigh, since it sounds like enduring and less like victory and I recognized it immediately as the truth in my life.
Right now, I can’t bear to hear of anyone else’s happiness. I would have to get up and leave the room. That’s not the change I want.
