“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.
Living Phoenix 