Some days, the idea of God makes me roll my eyes and full-on scoff, with the noise in the throat and everything, the head-shake, the eyeroll. The scathing whatever of put-upon teenagerdom.
Some days (most days) (every. damn. day.), I cannot deal with the illogic. All the doubts that I've always had. The questions have always lead to more questions; they only stopped when I stopped asking, and they built up in my bloodstream like a lining of secret madness, acid shame. Some call it going deeper; most days, lately, I call it circular and with every time my lips form the word, my throat relaxes and the madness lifts. I wonder if I'll ever call it anything else. I was born with these doubts; they'll never go away. I wonder how they nourish my Faith To Come, nestled deep somewhere, feeding on the warm, river which blooms within she who was born acid-lined with lead.
Some days, I need to be in silence, and my breathing deepens against the ache in my center as tears leak all day long, into the dark.
Almost every day, I am distrustful. I eye God from across a room, my legs crossed at the knee, foot working in the air like a metronome, my double-timed heartbeat. You. Hey YOU. This? It is not okay with me. It will never be okay. I don't care if you have a problem with that. I don't care if it's okay with you. I don't know if you'd call it a standoff, or a time-out. Or none of the above. Or if I'm just riding the rage, my one grownup-lady foot beating the hell out of the air while my soul kicks and screams and wears itself down like a righteously-enraged teenager-toddler.
Most days are sadness and anger. All days are fear. What keeps you from moving forward? Fear. What else can happen. What else are people capable of. Who do I already know; what is in them toward me. More importantly: What else am I capable of. What will I do from here. To what lure toward destruction might I succumb. What might finish me.
Most days are exhausting.
Many days, I think about giving up hope. And I say so. While driving home from work (because if I'm being honest, all of these days, rages, silences are prayer) (and because car-time is where I solve all the world's problems and tuck all the babies in), I bite my lips and consider - not with investment, but with dread at the reality - how frighteningly easy it might be. Genuinely frightening.
Those moments when God speaks: when it's so fast, and so few words, followed by waves that build on the event of it, that continue to transform the landscape in its wake. The infusion of holiness in my messy, messy car, inside me and out. In a millisecond.
give up your hope.
Almost ran a stop sign.
And then, the sense that that presence is gone. But not.
give up my hope?
give up your hope.
And I understand, more than I did.
The hopes that sustained my faith before: hopes that I could be good enough. Hopes that I would find meaning in all the tragedy. Expectation that I should be able to turn all the horror I carried into something pleasing. That I could be further along in all this, whatever that means, if I could just figure out how to Do It Right. The hopes that such stunted growth, so many mistakes were something that weren't really real, if I could just figure out how to Do Them Right, too.
give up your hope.
It's not up to me to make the terrible things that happened to me into something that will please God, whether by trying to understand them or remake them into something good or even really try to use them for anything. The sins committed against me will never, on any scale, ever be anything but evil. Even to God. [The same is true for my own sins, but we'll get to that.]
I always knew that God knew what had happened; I always felt that God wanted more out of me; I always believed that I fell short of what God could do with my experiences; I never knew how misplaced my hope was. I never knew that God knew the pain those misplaced hopes created. I never knew that God saw, and maybe even grieved, how hard I was trying, even as I refused to move, even as I fell flat on my face.
I still don't understand it. It's still not okay. We're still not okay.
But we're more okay than we were.
There is much hope in the absence of hope.
The tongues of grace resound, ever clearer.
And thank God that there's car insurance for when he's feeling chatty.
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