I feel like someone has stomped on the back of my neck. It’s a heavy weight, and it’s shoving my face into the ground. I’m trying to breathe, but the earth is unforgiving, so I struggle. My chest and heart feel like cracking with the exertion of each gasp. I’m paralyzed and I’m helpless.

I can’t do anything but wait. Wait for whoever or whatever is stomping on me to move away, for the weight to be lifted, so that I can get back up.

***

I’ve been working hard–really hard–harder than I’ve ever worked on anything before. This writing process is not for the weak. And that project, the one with rewrite after rewrite, the one that’s been kneaded like dough and polished like silver and reshaped and formed so many times–just died.

It’s not to say it won’t be resurrected, stranger things have happened. But for now, it’s in wrapped up and in the tomb. It’s laid to rest, a least for a while. And so I mourn.

And if you aren’t a writer or an artist, I don’t know if you’ll get it. But if you live by your heart and you’ve had to say goodbye to something special to you, maybe you can relate.

***
Disappointments are funny. Seems like rather than new cuts on healthy flesh, my wounds like to open themselves up right over old scars. One disappointment cuts open an old scar, a whisper of failure, the dread of self-doubt, the despair of worthlessness, and that disappointment feeds those ugly voices, the ones that perhaps have gone into hibernation but still bare their teeth once in a while.

And it’s not pretty, and because of that live-by-heart problem, there are tears, and loss, and sadness, and grief, and deep sorrow, about this loss and about the losses from before, about the sense of failure that comes now and the familiar feelings that betray the truth, that we aren’t as healed as we would hope.

***
This week I gave a talk on what the angels proclaimed at the birth of Jesus: our Savior, our Christ, our Lord.
And as these things go, I find myself desperate for the truth that has slipped so easily from my mouth just a few hours ago.

My savior when I need rescue. (Now.) My Christ when I need the anointed one to mediate on my behalf (desperately). My Lord when I need to, (once again), allow myself to be broken so that I might be led a little easier, that I might choose the path of most resistance–the one of service, and of waiting, and of love, and of ruthless trust.

How are you at disappointment?

Since Thanksgiving Day (that’s thirteen days ago), someone in my house has had a fever, a cough, a sinus infection, pink eye or a stomach bug. That’s thirteen days of cleaning up after sickness, changing sheets, helping cranky little people understand why they feel bad, cancelling play dates, (both mine and theirs), and choking medicine down my toddlers’ throat. So, to say the least, I’m feeling a bit…dry. Parched is more like it.

To be a mother is to learn to put other’s needs before my own. But nothing reminds me of my own self-centeredness more than a little push beyond the normal requirements. This week, I’ve been like a stomping snapping turtle, prowling around the kitchen. Cross my path, and I might bite your head off.

Oh, how easily I deceive myself into believing that in my own strength I’m good!

This week has been a much-needed reminder that I at the heart of it, I’m just not really that good. I’m not that loving, I’m not much of a servant, and I really, really, don’t like it when I don’t get my way. This is actually a lesson that I’ve learned repeatedly over the past six years. What I’m still learning is that the quicker I invite God into my mess, the quicker I can get out of it. It’s not that He makes the sickness go away faster…though I wouldn’t mind that. But He just doesn’t usually change my circumstances.

He changes me.

When I remember lesson #1: I’m not that good on my own
then I can move to lesson #2: asking for help. He alone can give me the strength, the patience, the love that just isn’t there without Him.

A few pity parties (well, maybe twenty) into the whole sickness thing, I decided that my P.O.ed attitude about life really wasn’t working anymore, and I’d better cave in and let God help. Whew, just in time. It was getting ugly here!

Since Thanksgiving Day (that’s thirteen days ago), someone in my house has had a fever, a cough, a sinus infection, pink eye or a stomach bug. That’s thirteen days of cleaning up after sickness, changing sheets, helping cranky little people understand why they feel bad, cancelling play dates, (both mine and theirs), and choking medicine down my toddlers’ throat. So, to say the least, I’m feeling a bit…dry. Parched is more like it.

To be a mother is to learn to put other’s needs before my own. But nothing reminds me of my own self-centeredness more than a little push beyond the normal requirements. This week, I’ve been like a stomping snapping turtle, prowling around the kitchen. Cross my path, and I might bite your head off.

Oh, how easily I deceive myself into believing that in my own strength I’m good!

This week has been a much-needed reminder that I at the heart of it, I’m just not really that good. I’m not that loving, I’m not much of a servant, and I really, really, don’t like it when I don’t get my way. This is actually a lesson that I’ve learned repeatedly over the past six years. What I’m still learning is that the quicker I invite God into my mess, the quicker I can get out of it. It’s not that He makes the sickness go away faster…though I wouldn’t mind that. But He just doesn’t usually change my circumstances.

He changes me.

When I remember lesson #1: I’m not that good on my own
then I can move to lesson #2: asking for help. He alone can give me the strength, the patience, the love that just isn’t there without Him.

A few pity parties (well, maybe twenty) into the whole sickness thing, I decided that my P.O.ed attitude about life really wasn’t working anymore, and I’d better cave in and let God help. Whew, just in time. It was getting ugly here!

Have you experienced a weariness of body, a heaviness of heart, or a discouraged soul? Have you, like me, wondered about it all, why we are here, and how the relentless demands of work and family create a slavish sense of daily responsiblities broken only by a few snatches of sleep, replaying again in the morning?

My circumstances sometimes contribute to the dryness but often my heart attitude is just as much at fault. It’s in times like these, these dry places of the soul, that I find myself remembering my first experiences of care and comfort in the arms of God.

My first spiritual friend was Christy, my high school BFF. When we hit it off, we hit it off. We started laughing the first night we hung out and we’ve hardly stopped since. We would spend the night alot at Christy’s (she had her own room and an older brother who played football), doing typical high school girl things…examining our blackheads and experimenting with makeup, dancing the Boot Scoot Boogy and singing with SWV “I’m so into youuuuu….I don’t know what I’m gonna doooo…..”

But under the cover of night and under the covers in her room, we would talk about other things too. We would talk boys and parents, hardships and heartbreaks. Christy was Catholic and I a mish-mash of Protestanism, and we would talk God. About communion and Jesus, about heaven and hell, about angels and prayer. We would talk about how we knew God, how we felt Him, and how we prayed. We would laugh so hard our sides would hurt, and we would laugh–and cry–our way through prayers together. I don’t know who came up with this in all that talk, but we had two images of God that we shared. The first was of whispering into his ear, pulling “His big ol’ ear” down to us, reaching up in the dark and grabbing on, Him leaning into us and us leaning into Him, telling him all those whispered secrets that need safe harbor outside of our own tentative souls.

The other was of flinging open my arms and receiving his love. Laying there in the bed, eyes fixed at the ceiling, head flung back, arms wide open, letting Him come in for the best hug, a hug big enough from arms strong enough to hold together all my broken pieces and make me whole again. I would close my arms around Him and I would almost expect to feel a physical presence as my arms squeezed around my back. He was that real. He was that close.

When I remember that, I’m reminded that in this time of spiritual dryness, perhaps the whispers in his ear and the surrender to his hug…arms wide open…fills me up in a way that transcends the mundane and gives me a glimpse of the depth and width and greatness of His love.