I wish I had a physical form for my syllabuses/syllabi to take this term... like the avalanche I feel like they represent. Then people would know where to find me. There would be rescue teams and medi-vac all poised  for the moment that I go under.
Real life, I suppose, is not really like that.
You have to ask for help. Again and again and again. Each time you need it. I am not yet good at that. I suppose I will get better or get buried alive. I'm one of the lucky ones though. I still have people to ask for help from. I forget that sometimes as people leave and fade out. But I have been blessed with new ones and just a few old ones.

Here's to having started something without really knowing if I'm the kind of person who can finish it. Here's to apologizing for the past lack of art and the continuance of this in the next 4 or 5 months. And here's for promising myself that I will learn how to make furniture or a long quality story or something when this is all over.

For now, it's time for some stew.

3 of 10

Tell me the secrets
That led to your falling.
Whisper the words
That first captured your heart .

Did they make you feel weightless?
Important?
Or Free?

Oh, Love, please tell me
What spell was spoken,
Which promise pronounced,
That ever could have made you leave?

Words are deceivers
--No, worse!
Words are mercenaries.

Love, have you not seen,
Words march for truth and guile alike
Without one helpful glance
To give you a clue?

Tell me the secrets.
Whisper the words.
Speak them aloud.

Hold them firmly besides truth.
See if they shrink and fold
Or grow bolder.
See if the fall was worth it.

Hurt vs. Harm

I've found myself in this place where the future is so far out of my control that I just have to trust that the God in control isn't sadistic because otherwise...I'm out of luck. I keep coming back (a bit unwillingly) to the ageless Christian response to the future: Jeremiah 29:11. I have brushed it off and tried to push it away. It's in the Bible...I say I believe the Bible, but I really just do not know where to put that.

God has asked plenty of people around me to walk through some terribly difficult things...things no one in their right mind asks to experience. It was His plan...and quite honestly, it sucked. No one can deny that it was just not a lot of fun for them to go through that, and God definitely asked them too. Because they are of older and better faith than I, they did it; but it hurt.

Finally, after I'm not quite sure how much burying, running, hiding and just about every other form of avoidance, I made peace with that bit. God promises that His plans are not to harm you. This is not a statement about pain. Instead, it is about damage.

It will hurt. It will suck. It will be just shy of unbearably difficult. But it will be good. It will not destroy you nor will it leave you paralyzed under a weight that traps you. His plans are for freedom and for hope. And we should not confuse the cost of those with the outcome. He gives us enough and makes us new.

If we believe these stories...

I was sitting in church the first time I followed that thought: "If we believe these stories..." And my black pen met my black book because I liked the sound of those words and I wanted to inspect their truth later. It has been a month or two or three since (not more than three though) and I still like them.

The sermon was on Psalm 105 and it asked us "why do we focus on the one thing that God has not done and ignore all that he has done?" Verse 14 talks about how God has moved kings for his small group of sojourners. It was good to be sure, but I think the most I got out of it was this phrase that would follow me..."if we believe these stories..."

I look at my Bible and I tell the world that I believe the words written in it. I promise to live by them and, perhaps, to die by them. But I forget.

Tonight is heavy. It doesn't have to be, but there are forces and people beyond my control making decisions, and they do not care that I am wrapped up in their story. They do not grasp the depth of their own significance, especially when one names them family...and that is ok. It is not good; but, quite simply, it is not the point. It is a symptom, not the problem itself. And so, tonight is heavy because I am waiting and hurting and trying to guess at the end. And because I am human. A woman living on a planet under a curse.

And I want to know what to do. I want to know how long this will last. I want to catalog all of my complaints and deliver them to heaven with a final request of answers in the same orderly fashion. Most of all, I want a promise that life wont always be this way, because, quite honestly, it has been just this for such a long time.

So I am sitting again, this time, weeks later, in my room. And just like that, I am holding that black book and looking at my Bible and hearing those words, "if we believe these stories..." Then what? At the time, the first time, I wrote: "If believe these stories...we should realize that we do not stand upon the shoulders of giants only, as the saying goes. But we stand and fall by the breath of God. A God of ancient goodness. We should have fallen a long time ago; but we forget our frailness and think ourselves invincible."

I wont get all of my answers delivered to me in bullet point form--that's hardly a way to live. But I get what I most want. It's truth. And it's a promise that life wont always be this. I forget what has been done and I get so afraid of something I know is not true. "There is a time for everything, for every activity under the sun." "Hope that is seen is not hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has?"

If I believe these stories, it changes everything. There are hundreds of people in that book who have fought their way through living. It is not a plan in black and white with diagrams, but it takes care of the bigger issues. It makes itself useful to all people in all places at all times...and it answers my fear and my humanity. It gives me just enough.