Living Phoenix

Tag: bible

  • Asking What, Not Why

    Asking What, Not Why

    “We are not necessarily doubting that God will do the best for us; we are wondering how painful the best will turn out to be.”
    ― C.S. Lewis

    The ashes of my terminal end seemed to fall about me for months. My panic persisted in abundance as I frantically thrashed about emotionally, desperate not to feel this remarkable pain of loss. Begging and bargaining out loud to nobody, waiting, screaming in an empty house, breaking into sudden fits of sobbing. I watched as she erased me from her life with out a word spoken to me. I thought of what helped in the past to cope with pain. Drugs? Never again, they only made my life worse the first time. Alcohol? I was too fearful I would take my own life if inhibited. Exercise? I couldn’t move. Frozen on the couch in a constant state of terror. Memories everywhere. Thoughts of her moving on to break her own promises too soon. I searched through a dating site and panicked in 36 hours, shutting it down- I couldn’t even imagine touching another person. I googled vacations and places to travel. Why travel with no person to make memories with, especially without the person you traveled with so much before the fall? Okay, all else failed perhaps a new hobby? Fear had become my new hobby. No light could shine onto any new possibility. To be honest, very little light still shines through the cracks of this prison wall. I found that all I could do is ask, why? Why God? WHY?

    Driven by fear and pain, “why” is the first question on the lips of every suffering child. It necessitates a satisfactory answer. It mandates a response that is fulfilling. I only want to hear one thing- I’ll fix this. My entire being is so consumed by the flames of fear that any response to my cosmic questioning, except all that I lost will be reinstated, will not suffice. “Why did this happen”, falls from my mouth and lungs so many times that it eventually evolves unnoticed to “why aren’t you answering me”? My mind is so chaotic all I can hear is the constant drone of unwanted memories and the sound of my heart breaking into more pieces. My body and mind buzzing with a million thoughts, regrets, alone beneath a blanket of shame. I ask for forgiveness but cannot even come close to forgiving myself. Hanging myself on that cross without the respect of a burial and certain of no resurrection. I believe God exists. I believe he can put me back together, speak miracles into existence, calm my storm. But I only want one thing from him. So, what I perceive is silence.

    When I found him in the garden, he was praying quietly, but he was speaking to me still: calling to me. Not giving me an answer. Not taking away my pain. Just inviting me to sit and share in his own experience of grief, even to the point of death. I had to wander in on him, there in that garden, several times. It took multiple invitations. Eventually, I sat there long enough to hear him speak again. “Now come with me to the cross”. Fear again took over because the cross demands my confessions. But this is what I asked him for: to hear him speak. Even then he did not answer my why. He wouldn’t because I already knew. I know why I am here. Instead I finally asked him what- what should I do? What do you want? What can I learn? What am I? What do YOU WANT ME TO UNDERSTAND? And then, the slightest movement. The next vision. The next image. Coming in more clearly every time. Speaking to me. First he demanded honesty. He demanded me to speak the truth in my confession. Then he walked toward the cross and I hoped to follow. That was my first real experience knowing for certain that I heard the voice of God. No voice at all- but I heard it still. What now? Well, I don’t know. But I do know, at least, He is real. And He speaks to me.

    “Why” still wanders into my heart every few minutes, it seems. It still sucks the air out of the room and pierces my chest with sudden pain. I try to redirect my question to “what”. Knowing that “why” will trap me and “what” will eventually free me. Hoping. Wanting. Wishing. What do you want me to understand, Lord?

  • Sunday Sidebar

    Sunday Sidebar

    God still speaks to us. Why is God silent when we need him most? He isn’t standing by. He isn’t teaching us something through silence. He isn’t sadistic. The answer is chaos. There is so much chaos. So much pain and loss that terror fills every part of us so that all we can hear is the echos of our screams. For the same reason we are unable to see someone’s love and commitment to us when it is right in front of us and we make choices that contradict our true identity- we don’t see that we are standing in our own way while God speaks. He speaks: through feelings, emotions, thoughts, dreams, words, visions… But if I am so surrounded and filled with FEAR, I cannot hear the voice in the storm. Fear of losing what we had forever. Fear that we already know it will never return to “normal”. Fear that what God will say we do not want to hear. Because only one thing, one single response, would do. And that is what we want most and most what we cannot have. And fear is so damn loud.

    My vision comes to me in low resolution, like an old television, bunny ear antennae straining in different directions to pull in bits and pieces of the image across the screen. Christ kneeling in a garden. It’s dark. It’s dark all around in the trees that surround him with a single torch burning in a small clearing. He doesn’t look at me. I cannot see his face. I see his clothes. His robe- brown and white, his low resolution bare feet behind him but I cannot make out his toes. Odd that I look every time. I hear him praying quietly, desperately, and with fervor. He is sweating and it drips to the ground. I hear him praying. And I hear him say “come sit with me”. He doesn’t pause his prayer, he doesn’t turn to say anything to me, but I hear him.

    This is where my journey with him often ends. He doesn’t speak any further wisdom to me. I have nothing profound to walk away with. Nothing to change my life back to whole. Only an invitation to kneel by him and suffer beside him. To witness the pain on his face as he prepares to lose everything he has known in life. His friends, his family, his hopes, his dreams, his comforts. Only an invitation to hear his desperate whispers. To be still. And to know.

  • Longing for Acceptance When Devoid of Hope

    Longing for Acceptance When Devoid of Hope

    As grief drags on, minute-by-minute, day-by-day, the constant torture of uninvited memories begins to fatigue the ounce of will that remains in a bleeding soul. The longing to not hurt anymore becomes the pain of an itch left unscratched around the nose. Pleading and begging, praying and crying, bargaining and changing: all fall on the deaf ears of a cold hearted person and a distant God. Anyone who says in those early moments of grief, God brings me peace, are suspect and questionable that they truly loved what they lost at all. They have not felt the burning iron piercing their side, day and night.

    The literature and devotionals are thick with the grieving in the silence of a Creator. Who has ever successfully explained this? “God’s silence does not mean his absence”. How I loathe those words now. Does this mean he sits near and and speaks nothing while I suffer? Does he stand over me, towering above, not reaching out a single hand of comfort? His ways are not our ways and his thoughts are not our thoughts. I understand. But still, how the longing grows from I want my person back to I want my God to be real in this moment. Eventually, we will break. Our will cannot remain forever beneath the weight of our grief. A crossroad has appeared and the options are narrowed. Which is the correct path, in my own personal suffering, I will not pretend to know. One path goes with God and the other we travel alone.

    I see God as the option that offers me the most hope. And in these moments, it is hope that is our rarest commodity. A precious metal, water in the desert, rumor of a cure for a horrid disease. If God is real, then he has not judged me for questioning him. He has not hurt me for throwing my punches in his direction. It seems, on the contrary, my punishment comes only when I direct my frustration on myself or others. Daniel wrestled with God. How we adore that simple quote. Perhaps, we do not understand the full weight of what is meant by “wrestle with God”. From the painful words he cast at his Lord it was not the playful tussle of a father and son. It was an angry child on the playground, hurt so badly he did not care the consequences of lashing out at something bigger than him. And yet, that was part of his pursuit of God. It was him becoming, and being, a “man after God’s own heart”.

    “Oh Lord, how long will you forget me? Forever? How long will you look the other way? How long must I struggle with anguish in my soul, with sorrow in my heart every day? How long will my enemy have the upper hand? Turn and answer me, O Lord my God! Restore the sparkle in my eyes, or I will die.” Psalms 13: 1-3. Or I will die…does that speak to the grieving heart?

    That is David sitting at a crossroad at the very bottom of life. That is David declaring he doesn’t understand, that he is in great pain, that he reaches out and nothing is reaching back. Sound familiar? But it is also his declaration that if there is to be any hope, in his hopeless life, it cannot come from anywhere but God. David cheated on his wife. He committed murder. And he is regarded as the epitome of the kind, loving, Godly, servant. He had shame. He had guilt. He felt as though he lost everything he had to live for. He had depression. He had profound sadness. He had anger. He grieved. And as he cast all of those emotions onto God, I imagine he finally fell exhausted with no will remaining but to eventually be picked up and carried by God to higher ground. And that gives us something to hope for.

    Hope still eludes me nearly every day. So much so, that I find myself longing for it, dreaming of it, willing to cut off my own decaying flesh to obtain it. Why? I do not know. I just know that I could use someone holding me close and walking with me, and no person will ever do the way they did again. So, I need something more, something bigger, something cosmic. I need a God that is willing to hear me, to tolerate me, to see me. David sang praises again after surviving the worse life had to throw at him. I suppose, I want that, too. For myself, and also for you. And while acceptance may remain in the periphery, this is a step in the right direction.

    “‘Hope’ is a the thing with feathers-” by Emily Dickinson

    “Hope” is the thing with feathers- That perches in the soul- And sings the tune without words- And never stops- at all- And sweetest- in the Gale- is heard- And sore must be the storm- That could abash the little Bird That kept so many warm- I’ve heard it in the chillest land- And on the strangest Sea- Yet- never- in Extremity, It asked a crumb- of me.

  • To Whom Shall We Bargain With Nothing to Offer But What is Left of Our Souls?

    To Whom Shall We Bargain With Nothing to Offer But What is Left of Our Souls?

    “Bargaining. What could I exchange for you? The silence after storms? My typing fingers?” Linda Pastan, The Five Stages of Grief

    The hardest part of mourning my deepest loss, besides the loss of the person themself, is the compulsory crying out to God and quiet waiting for my life to come back together, only to wake up in the morning still crying and broken. Begging for repair, hoping to the point of actual belief it would happen, watching it grow further and further away.

    Bargaining is a stage, or part, of grief that feels more reflexive than any other desperate emotion during the process- it flows out of us as an offering or a sacrifice in a plea for deliverance. It is that one piece of the grieving process that is most woven into every single other stage we may progress through, and what, I believe, keeps us the furthest away from acceptance. For what should I concern myself with the embrace of my new reality when I have the hope of a lifeline? Instead, we often find ourselves graveling at the foot of the person we lost, our God or higher power, or both.

    “Bargaining is a defense against the feelings of helplessness experienced after a loss. It happens when people struggle to accept the reality of the loss and the limits of their control over the situation.” Sabrina Romanoff, PSYD

    The hopelessness of bargaining is like pissing into the wind and calling it rain. The problem with bargaining is that the alternative is to accept every single hope and dream that just died an unjust death and changed every inch of your reality will never be known again. To those of us who grieve, that would be a most certain death sentence. So, we tell ourselves we will change, we do change ourselves, we continue to do the little things around the house that our loved ones used to appreciate, we beg those around us, we offer deals to our accusers, and we offer God anything he so chooses and a lifetime of service if he will just do this one miracle. I went so far as to offer God my life for just one more year. Nothing. Then it was one more day. Still nothing. Then it was my life for the pain I was left with- obviously, nothing. Until there is nothing else, acceptance remains a step away.

    Our friends and our family encourage us to trust in God’s promises, and rightfully so; they love us and have the same desire for hope and recovery that we do. We are certain those promises must equate to his willingness to give us back what we lost. And there, again, lies the difference between reality and expectations: disappointment. But this disappointment is a loss of what little hope we are able to conjure, a cosmic let down of cosmic scale. Even in this cycle of hope and hope lost, over and over again, I’d rather to have hoped in those moments to something greater than myself than to have lost it all without a fight. The underlying hope that will remain, that must go unseen amidst our pain, is the hope that bargaining leads to self-reflection, change, and a relationship with God. Each time, a little better than the days before. We can hope.

    Can God perform a miracle and put what you lost back together? I don’t know. If your grieving death, no. How is a cold heart any different than the dead? A person’s free will is a death to God as a beatless heart is to a person. Can God give you the strength to carry on? I think so. I hope so. In these times, you know the weakness and inabilities of being human more acutely than any other person at any other stage in their life. And for some reason, in these times, we crave God’s strength. And we carry on. We hope there is something to that.

    Bargain with hope. But remember we have nothing much to give in this bartering than what we have left inside of us. And eventually, our sight of the scope of the damage around us needs to become bigger and bigger in every effort to accept that nothing taken away will be given back the same. Hope as we know it now may not be the hope as we know it when it is all said and done.

    “Faith shows the reality of what we hope for; it is evidence of things we cannot see.” Hebrews 11:1

  • We Climb with the Window in the Weather, But We Prepare During the Storm

    We Climb with the Window in the Weather, But We Prepare During the Storm

    “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.” Rene Daumal

    Once, while married, happy, and safe, I lived my entire day for the promise of bedtime. That glorious moment when you gather the bedside waters, vitamins, and books. Fan blowing across the bed, dogs curled up, and your partner in her glasses reading, you feel your day melt away as you crawl beneath the comforter between soft clean sheets. I still remember how my heart rate would slow, her hair in my face, rubbing feet as an early but welcomed sleep would fall in a quiet dark room. A fresh morning would await. Enter the shock of grief: the grim serial killer of restorative rest. It isn’t merely the loneliness of the bed that once was filled with a covenant of love, it is the intrusive and unwelcome memories like ghosts haunting throughout the night. Sleep will allude you now, quiet will haunt, and rest will be a thing of the past like a fading childhood memory that you are unsure if you experienced first hand or simply heard the story so many times it seems like it was at some point real. Those nights of tormented sleep, hungover mornings despite sobriety, are when we notice the violence of the storm the most intensely.

    It is not only the early days of our grieving that plague our sleep. This sick disease goes on for months- sometimes years. God’s love is certainly not evident that one person can sleep soundly with their choices while the other one writhes in pain month after month. No more than the question of the ones we love who died whereabouts in the comfort of an afterlife. For that requires a little more blind faith than the miracles we will witness here on earth, or so it seems. None-the-less, we were designed to persist. And we owe the world our persistence. So we move on like the grittiest of endurance athletes. If only grit alone would bear our trials and deliver us to the other side of this horrific storm. What to do when our perseverance lets us down, and it will, and we fall back toward our last camp on Grief Mountain?

    Summits and safe descents are made on the planning and timing of the weather windows in our storms. With grief, we sit longer, we think longer and deeper, we find ourselves snowed in and enclosed from the outside elements. Everything we do to prepare for that short break in the weather makes the difference in our progress up and down the mountain. Who can command the storms and quiet the wind? To whom shall we call out when the waves threaten to overturn our boat?

    “The disciples went and woke him up, shouting, Lord save us! We are going to drown. Jesus responded, why are you afraid? You have so little faith! Then he got up and rebuked the wind and waves, and suddenly there was a great calm.” Matthew 8:25-26

    So often, in our most painful time, it seems that Jesus sleeps while we hold onto the boat for dear life. We scream out for him to awake and rebuke the wind and the waves. The grit we have is there to help us hold on while we await his awakening and take command of our storm. And for every break in the weather, every time God quiets the rain, we move further to the back of the boat where one day, we hope, we might find rest beside him.

    We are driven to the summit because we have seen it before. Though it’s beauty evades our eyes, it’s memory lives on in our hearts. We prepare for that window in the weather: we pray, eat, clean up our lives, slowly grow accustomed to the pain of the cold wind, in-by-inch, until the storm ceases and we emerge ready to climb. Knowing with every step the weather will again change, but stronger now because we prepared a little more with each passing storm.