It is amazing to me how certain places (literal, physical places) find us without a song in our heart.
I’ve gone back and forth from one pseudo home to another a lot in the past month and a half, for reasons both heart-wrenching and factual. I’ve laid down my head in one place and another, trying to make the transitions when they came seamless and emotionally solid but fumbling awkwardly to do so. When I am on one sidewalk I am convinced it is the place I should be. When I’m on the other, that is where I am my best self. I’ve stared off like little children do when they’re tired, not aware of the fact that their eyes are still open and you’re trying to talk to them as they look slightly to your left in a daze, their minds taking a break. I wonder, in that liminal space, when in fact it is that I will marry the two selves, the two life places I battle between.
When life throws you tragedy externally and you’ve already been struggling with known crises internally, the process is both startling to the system and not at all unfamiliar, all at once. It is a new grief, but not unlike the one you’ve been living with. Just a different subject matter, and perhaps, in certain moments, a never before experienced new concept of sadness as a result. You find you are this young person trapped in the midst of age-old heaviness and weight. You have experienced the depths of this place for what feels like eternity, and are shocked upon waking to the actual truth of its comparatively brief duration.
Almost jarringly to yourself and perhaps even others, you find a levity here that’s borderline inappropriate. A capacity to find the humorous and the upbeat in music and empty conversation. Never once will I be taken for a neuroscientist, but I’d wager it is the brain’s necessary response to counterbalance weight with light.
So, to find somewhere in the middle? That’s probably best. That is what I pray for, the middle line of grief and peace. Enough grief to keep you sober-minded, enough peace to point to Christ in your every moments.
Gradually, I’d imagine, you will find the peace outweighs the grief. But the grief must remain if you are to be fully alive, if you are to appreciate Jesus, if you are to extend yourself to other souls with hanging heads themselves.
Perhaps this unusual space is what God intended. Perhaps this is what growing up looks like. Perhaps this is how we, as fallen as we are, are purified through the fire, are purified to become like Christ.
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10 For you, O God, have tested us;
you have tried us as silver is tried.
11 You brought us into the net;
you laid a crushing burden on our backs;
12 you let men ride over our heads;
we went through fire and through water;
yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance.
you have tried us as silver is tried.
11 You brought us into the net;
you laid a crushing burden on our backs;
12 you let men ride over our heads;
we went through fire and through water;
yet you have brought us out to a place of abundance.
