Living Phoenix

Tag: love and loss

  • (Are) We Are Stars (?)

    (Are) We Are Stars (?)

    I walked along the beach, some hour past midnight. The moon was low and red, the tide pulled high, the ocean vast. Where the water would end and the sky began was somewhere on the spectrum of imagination. Did I wander onto this place in company? No, I am certain I came here alone. My lonely footprints trailed behind the shifting sand. “Two footprints there beside my own, always within reach…”; the child’s prayer whispered at bedtimes everywhere came to mind. No, only one set of footprints chased my weary self. Though creations beauty mocked my brokenness, I did not feel his presence there. So, I went searching in the darkness.

    Eventually, my feet came to meet the waters edge. It’s slow push and pull, rise and fall, the sand rushing from beneath my ten toes. I felt the salted plea to walk into the sea. The hidden urge to swim toward the non-existent horizon until I could go no more. Then, diving down on single breath, deeper, deeper, deeper still, until the weight of the water pulled me home. A sudden deep breath reminded me I was still standing there at the waters edge. The moon was stunning before me, the stars were bright above me, but upwards the beach was black and void. So, I went searching in the darkness.

    My mind would wander here and there in violent sudden jerks of memories past and hopes future. My heart would swell in pain and mourn, each breath a seconds desperate relief. I talked a lot. To God and you. I suppose that is why I felt such company. My thoughts so deep I disappeared into the matching darkness ahead on the beach: a vapor. A dangerous place to be, to become my thoughts, my memories. Each step a falling leg of unconscious direction, I was just another empty shell upon that beach. Until the piercing pain of something sharp drew me from my stupor, I did finally stop. Uncertain of how I came this far, into darkness, along some quiet shore, I stood and stared.

    I looked up into the void ahead and watched: a dark blot, a soft something, an orb of black. Growing closer, getting bigger, moving. Perhaps, some other person roamed this beach some hours past midnight, too. Closer still in eery quiet, bigger even with every moment. Then it stopped. I stepped closer, searching in the darkness. He stood there, a dark black stallion, tall in confident strength, his mares behind him shifting in the sand. A warning breath from flared nostrils as I stared. God was here. No footprints in the sand, but his fingerprints everywhere around me. I wanted to share it with you. This moment. This experience. But it belonged to me.

    As suddenly as they came they raced towards me. My heart raced, too, but I was not afraid. I longed for death. Then, when almost in reach, they turned away and ran back up the shore. Once again transformed into their dark black orbs, growing smaller, darker still, until nothing. The darkness called me no longer. I looked up in that moment into the sky, hoping to see God or you. The stars were too many, bright and scattered, like spilled diamonds across a black felt cloth. They were beautiful and I was small. Insignificant to the stars, yet somehow still significant to the same Creator. I wondered if looking back the stars saw me shining in the same way I saw them. Are we stars to some cosmic eye? Shining bright, sharing light, burning hot, scattered about in service of the universe? So, I went searching in the darkness. Until light found me there.

  • Fear Wears a Thousand Masks

    Fear Wears a Thousand Masks

    My, how I have run to escape her, this thing called Fear, for nearly all of my life. I was introduced to her as a child: the blunt force, cold isolation, rancid stench of it’s presence in the room, as if it had only recently roomed with death before turning me to its prey. A devilish beast known to play with it’s food, leaving the hunted paralyzed and shaken but still alive. Fear. Fear of fear. The cycle that infects a lifetime of otherwise divine potential.

    The more I hid from all of my fears the more creative she became. She’d strike and pierce my side or my heart, inflict my thoughts and my dreams; and though her presence was known, I could not see her though I tried. I saw instead anger, depression, rage, anxiety, abandonment, embarrassment, even laughter on the strangest of occasions. I saw desperation to protect myself, guard my heart, run, fight, hide. But it was her, I am sure. Fear, masked in my outburst, demanding I take control of everything or my fate would be the grave. Or worse, loneliness.

    While she distracts you from awareness and leads you to your darkest emotions, how quickly she will work upon your heart and mind. Silencing God. Convincing you of great personal afflictions. Replacing your self image. Holding you back and tying you down. Fear is the great illusionist. An instinct for survival that secretly desires to be so much more. An irony that survival can be worse than death when consumed by her spirit. Fear needs to be fed and her appetite is endless. The pain of loss of flesh leads to coping and coping is our greatest temptations of false comfort when it is fear that has instructed us all these years.

    Fear wears a thousand masks. Yet all of fear dies a thousand deaths when illuminated by truth. Love can never, ever, be received in a state of fear. That is why God did not create us in a spirit of fear, but one of strength, and power, and self-discipline. God hears us and he knows our fears. But we cannot hear him when we are consumed by it. Every prayer must start with an honest confession of our fears, a request to see ourselves as God sees us in that moment: fear will run and hide from the light shown in the truth. And the truth is that God makes each of us in his image. So that when we are weak, his strength is made perfect. He calls me Bold. And I rarely feel so, but when I need it most he says it out loud. You are bold. Because in your weakness you embraced me, you were brave, and you will have my strength.

    “This is my command- be strong and courageous! Do not be afraid or discouraged. For the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.” Joshua 1:9

  • 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.

  • The Shadow of A Memory on The Scorched Earth

    The Shadow of A Memory on The Scorched Earth

    The calendar holds memories that commemorated joy. Though the earth rotates more slowly now those days still return, year-by-year, only now to cast a shadow across the scorched earth upon which you labor. Sweat across your brow, arms shaking with fatigue, fingers aching to grasp the broken pieces you lift, heavy back and weary legs. Wrapping paper, candles, family, and cake: replaced by dry tongue and pitted stomach, a rising nausea that captures your throat. The laughter and smiles, the palpable excitement, now but apparitions haunting about your day. Nothing gets replaced that God has taken away. No joy repeated that man took for granted. Happy birthdays lose their happy. Merry Christmas never merry. Every memory on a calendar a potential nidus for infection. With only the remnants of pride we chant, “your best days were those loved by me”. But with the whole of your heart, “I wish I was there”.