Like Having Something Stuck Between Your Teeth

On hearing it, many of his disciples said, “This is a hard teaching. Who can accept it?” Aware that his disciples were grumbling about this, Jesus said to them, “Does this offend you? What if you see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before! The Spirit gives life; the flesh counts for nothing. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life. Yet there are some of you who do not believe.” For Jesus had known from the beginning which of them did not believe and who would betray him. He went on to say, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless the Father has enabled him.” From this time many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him. “You do not want to leave too, do you?” Jesus asked the Twelve. Simon Peter answered him, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life…” (John 6: 60-69)

And to quote one of my favorite people in the world:

“Never have I ever questioned God as much as I have in the past three months.

And never have I ever needed as big a wake up call as I do now.”

Things I’ve Learned

There are a few things I’ve learned about myself in this process. Among them, that I cope by sleeping. I love to sleep because those are the only blissful hours I have anymore. Hours where I wish I were lucid in forgetfulness. I sleep, hoping that when I wake up everything will have been a troubling dream. And then I wake and it’s never so.

Another thing, that I’m terribly afraid of people’s expectations of me. In my, perhaps skewed, perception of things, I suppose that people expect me to have moved somewhere in my grief in the last eight weeks. I haven’t moved anywhere. Every weekend, there comes this point where I feel just as though it happened yesterday and my thoughts and emotions are as raw and as broken as they were then. I struggle with the very same questions about God’s purpose and goodness. I cry just as hard as I did that day that, Bommy, I called you outside of Uris. So, to answer all of your questions about “how you’re doing with Grace”, I’m not. I’m not going anywhere. These past eight weeks have been the longest eight weeks of my life, but if you expect that eight weeks is long enough for me to show some signs of improving, know that I’m not.

But then here, a little bit of hope for those of you who have followed my blog:

I went to Jeremy’s house in Mountain Creek over my Fall Break. On Sunday we went to Jeremy’s church and I had had the crappiest night and morning, so much so that I had to walk out in the middle of worship. I felt guilty for leaving when it wasn’t my church so I went back for the sermon. After the sermon, we got ready to take communion but I, in my state of rebelliousness, had to seriously consider whether or not I could take communion that day. As I sat there thinking about God and whether or not I really believed in him, I began to feel that, in my innermost being, this God that I have believed in all my life is undeniably real, even in my suffering and in this wordy sentence. I’ve never been one to need concrete evidence of God and I still am not. Needless to say, I took the bread and the cup that day.

Like the Sky

Excerpt from A Grief Observed, CS Lewis:

At first I was very afraid of going to places where H. and I had been happy – our favourite pub, our favourite wood. But I decided to do it at once – like sending a pilot up again as soon as possible after he’s had a crash. Unexpectedly, it makes no difference. Her absence is no more emphatic in those places than anywhere else. It’s not local at all. I suppose that if one were forbidden all salt one wouldn’t notice it much more in any one food than in another. Eating in general would be different, every day, at every meal. It is like that. The act of living is different all through. Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.

 

By now I have pretty much quoted every passage of this book that seems to speak straight out of my heart. I keep expecting someone to tell me to stop feeding my “bad” emotions (I guess I would tell someone if I saw them going through this), but then I’d retort that it’s really only when I feel them that I feel like myself at all.

God is God is God

I read the Bible this week for the first time in a long time, with any real expectations or longing.

There have been times in these past six weeks where I haven’t carried my Bible with me out of a sort of defiance. But most of the time I feel like having it in my bag is safe. I don’t take it out of my bag, but it’s there. That one time this week I started reading John; I told myself I needed to remind myself who Jesus was. I didn’t read anything revelatory but it was in those few minutes that I coveted His comfort that I felt the Lord hiding me in his word. In that moment alone, and never again since then, I knew that the Bible is true and that God is God.

It’s Been Five Weeks

Excerpt from A Grief Observed, CS Lewis:

I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history, and if I don’t stop writing that history at some quite arbitrary point, there’s no reason why I should ever stop. There is something new to be chronicled every day. Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.

Still missing you daily.

Old Habits

I regret praying prayers that God would take everything I ever held onto away from me. Now that he has actually done it, what would it mean for me to revert right back to doing and darkening my heart with the same things I did before? This hole is meant only for God to fill.

For Every Penny in the World

(Long) Exerpt from A Grief Observed, CS Lewis:

“It’s not true that I’m always thinking of H. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I’m not are perhaps my worst. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss. Like in those dreams where nothing terrible occurs – nothing that would sound even remarkable if you told it at breakfast-time – but the atmosphere, the taste, of the whole thing is deadly. So with this. I see the rowan berries reddening and don’t know for a moment why they, of all things, should be depressing. I hear a clock strike and some quality it always had before has gone out of the sound. What’s wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember.

This is one of the things I’m afraid of. The agonies, the mad minight moments, must, in the course of nature, die away. But what will follow? Just this apathy, this dead flatness? Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal? Does grief finally subside into boredom tinged by faint nausea?

Feelings, and feelings, and feelings. Let me try thinking instead. From the rational point of view, what new factor has H.’s death introduced into the problem of the universe? What grounds has it given me for doubting all that I believe? I knew already that these things, and worse, happened daily. I would have said that I had taken them into account. I had been warned – I had warned myself – not to reckon on worldly happiness. We were even promised sufferings. They were part of the programme. We were even told, ‘Blessed are they that mourn,’ and I accepted it. I’ve got nothing that I hadn’t bargained for. Of course it is different when the thing happens to oneself, not to others, and in reality, not in imagination. Yes; but should it, for a sane man, make quite such a difference as this? No. And it wouldn’t for a man whose faith had been real faith and whose concern for other people’s sorrows had been real concern. The case is too plain. If my house has collapsed at one blow, that is because it was a house of cards. The faith which ‘took these things into account’ was not faith but imagination. The taking them into account was not real sympathy. If I had really cared, as I thought I did, about the sorrows of the world, I should not have been so overwhelmed when my own sorrow came. It has been an imaginary faith playing with innocuous counters labeled ‘Illness,’ ‘Pain,’ ‘Death,’ and ‘Loneliness.’ I thought I trusted the rope until it mattered to me whether it would bear me. Now it matters, and I find I didn’t.

Bridge-players tell me that there must be some money on the game ‘or else people won’t take it seriously.’ Apparently it’s like that. Your bid – for God or no God, for a good God or the Cosmic Sadist, for eternal life or nonentity – will not be serious if nothing much is staked on it. And you will never discover how serious it was until the stakes are raised horribly high, until you find that you are playing not for counters or for sixpences but for every penny you have in the world…

Is this last note a sign that I’m incurable, that when reality smashes my dream to bits, I mope and snarl while the first shock lasts, and then patiently, idiotically, start putting it together again? And so always? However often the house of cards falls, shall I set about rebuilding it? Is that what I’m doing now?

Indeed it’s likely enought that what I shall call, if it happens, a ‘restoration of faith’ will turn out to be only one more house of cards…

All that stuff about the Cosmic Sadist was not so much the expression of thought as of hatred. I was getting from it the only pleasure a man in anguish can get; the pleasure of hitting back. It was really just Billingsgate – mere abuse; ‘telling God what I thought of Him.’ And of course, as in all abusive language, ‘what I thought’ didn’t mean what I thought true. Only what I thought would offend Him (and His worshipers) most. That sort of thing is never said without some pleasure. Gets it ‘off your chest.’ You feel better for a moment…

What is grief compared with physical pain? Whatever fools may say, the body can suffer twenty times more than the mind. The mind has always some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous. Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead; physical pain is like the steady barrage on a trench in World War One, hours of it with no let-up for a moment. Thought is never static; pain often is.

What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, ‘Come back,’ is all for my own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it were possible, would be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could i have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again? They call Stephen the first martyr. Hadn’t Lazarus the rawer deal?

I begin to see. My love for H. was of much the same quality as my faith in God… neither was the thing I thought it was.”

An Explanation

I know that you care, but when you ask me how I’m doing, it’s one thing for you to ask me and then go about your day with minimal thought about my response: a shrug or an “I’m… okay.” But the thing is, for me, that question is much heavier than it used to be; that question causes me to take a mental stroll through the events and emotions of the weeks that have passed, and… I’d rather not.

As I Doubt Your Goodness

The Spirit helps us in our weakness. We do not know what we ought to pray for, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with groans that words cannot express… Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? As it is written: “For your sake we face death all day long; we are considered as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation , will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

(Romans 8:26-39)

Not Talking To You Just Yet

But finding comfort in Your truth:

¹ May the LORD answer you when you are in distress;
may the name of the God of Jacob protect you.

² May he send you help from the sanctuary
and grant you support from Zion.

³ May he remember all your sacrifices
and accept your burnt offerings.
Selah

⁴ May he give you the desire of your heart
and make all your plans succeed.

⁵ We will shout for joy when you are victorious
and will lift up our banners in the name of our God.
May the LORD grant all your requests.

⁶ Now I know that the LORD saves his anointed;
he answers him from his holy heaven
with the saving power of his right hand.

⁷ Some trust in chariots and some in horses,
but we trust in the name of the LORD our God.

⁸ They are brought to their knees and fall,
but we rise up and stand firm.

⁹ O LORD, save the king!
Answer us when we call!

(Psalm 20)