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.