Midnight Burdens

Hello.

It's been a while since I've even thought of you.  Which shows that I've healed some.  But the fact that I'm lying in bed now, in tears over the mess you left behind, well perhaps that shows that some things never heal.  We simply find a way to store our worst memories in the darkest corners of our brain.  And we hope that they'll somehow waste away into nothingness so that we won't have to deal with them any more.

Anger is only proof that feelings still exist, they say, and so I must still have feelings for you.  And really after all, you are the reason for half my insecurities about marriage, so how could I forget you?

But see, the truth is that I can't even hate you.  I tried - hating you would be much easier than this.  But no, I have too many memories, too much invested in your children, too much pain and heartache and love and memory for that.  Sometimes I wish I could run away from myself.  Maybe then I wouldn't remember how you betrayed my father, how you lied to your wife, how you blasphemed our God.

And then, equal to or worse than these sins, you did the thing that you should never have done.  It would be better for you to have had a millstone tied around your neck and for you to be thrown into the sea than what you did.  You hurt your children - no, you tortured them.  You used them as pawns in your childish game of hate, you twisted the words of our healing Savior into lies to make them soul-sick, you made them cry again and again, and yet they chose to spend time with you.  Because they craved the father they hoped you would be - the father you stopped being a long time before you left them.

And yet, after all this I cannot bring myself to hate you. 

In the end, I can only feel an exhausted sorrow for you.  Exhausted because every time I try to justify anything you've done, I cannot.   And sorrowful because I know that you understood Jesus Christ.

Whether or not you surrendered (or will surrender) to Him, I doubt I will ever know in this life.  But I know for sure that you understood and believed in Him at one point.  And knowing that you had a glimpse of his glory and peace and you are now living without Him - that is the worst of this tragedy.

And though I hate the filth that you created and the brokenness that you left behind, I hope that someday you look up from the pit you've fallen into, and you that see His face again.  Because you must miss Him. 

Untitled

     I once knew a man who, when thinking, thought only to analyze: to break open, to lift up, to turn over, to discover, or to burn.  He knew no other way.

     So when this friend of mine turned his complex mind to God and the world filled with things he could neither see nor touch, he found only questions.  Questions!  Five hundred burning, churning, ripping, boiling questions that he could not answer, and an ocean of pain.

     When, upon further consideration, he could not deny the existence of the One, he found himself angry at It's existence, It's presence, and It's seeming circumvention.  He found himself crying out at the injustice of the answers he feared from the questions he could not satisfy.  And so he stood right where he was and he screamed curses to try to fill the ever-present silence, silence born of his fear.

     But he had asked so many questions that he forgot to keep searching for the truth - or even for the answers.  He did not notice the truth of the fact that the enemy was in himself. 

     And the enemy was growing.  Mercilessly feeding on his organs and drinking from his blood, little by little, it turned his heart from a heart of flesh to a heart of darkness.

     And every time my friend thought he caught a glimpse of this parasite within himself, he found it too terrible - too terrible! It was easier, he found, to spend his moments cursing God and dying, rather than confront the evil and the pain and the brokenness that lived within his own chest.

     And so he drank a bitter draught of rage each day, and it fueled him to stand, to live, and to be.  But at night, in the darkness of a solemn midnight, when he could no longer preoccupy his own complex mind, he considered the other side of the great conversation.  The dreadful What If? 

     What If?  Oh the torturous thought! What if by raging against the One, he was damning himself forever to be apart from the only thing that could save his anguished soul?  And yet, through the stillness of the night, there whispered a voice both gentle and sure,

     "Ye who are weary of whipping my back, come home and find rest in my arms."