Hold

Sometimes you are given a gift that you don’t know how to accept. You don’t know how to receive it, because you don’t know the depths of your own heart, and the little you do know leads you to believe that you will ruin it if you do accept it or if you don’t.

Sometimes you don’t have faith enough to believe that the good you are given is really good, and sometimes the life factors that play against you contradict the good. Sometimes you feel the grace running out with the time; you wonder if God is really on your side after all, if He would bother to act on your behalf.

You ask big things of human people, breaking intimacy over fear, building walls around your broken heart. How does it hurt this much, how can God feel so far away?

“It’s death,” he said while we talked the other day, me letting Canaan-dreams slip away in betrayal, wondering how Sarah felt in all those barren years of travel away from what she’d known.

I rummaged through my hope chest and ran across a poem – death laced with hope. I woke again to a time I’d forgotten, a time before I told God I didn’t want to be used by Him, a time that feels more real than now, a time merging into now.

Don’t know why I’m standing here,
Caught in this place for too many years,
Chasing shadows, chasing dreams,
I can’t trust, I can’t get free…
Pain-filled eyes haunt my mind,
The darkness comes, and I am blind
It killed me, I am dead—
I am a walking dead.

I can’t help that I’ve seen too much,
This pain that I can’t seem to touch,
I can’t be strong, can’t heal this wound,
I’m in too deep; I’m dying soon.
These demons that are crushing me
Don’t care that I am dead, that I can’t see.
I’m running here, so afraid
Why can’t I get away?

Can’t be weak, must be strong
Must fight back, can’t go on
Too afraid of the black night here
Helpless sobbing—too deep for tears.
Garbled words escape my lips,
Still burning from betrayal’s kiss.
I am sorry, I am dead, I’m dead
I’ve lived too many lives.

I’m running, falling in this place
Finding here a strong embrace
Whispers from a voice so soft,
Cutting through the fear and loss…
A song I think I’ve heard before
Gentleness I’ve never known—
Thought that I was all alone,
Dying in this place.

The rising moon is silver-gowned,
Cutting lightly through the clouds
I’m leaning hard on a shoulder firm
Covered by a gracious arm.
Don’t need to hope, just rest for now,
Shadows fleeing the moonlight glow.
Trembling, with a hand in mine,
I am not alone this time,
Sheltered, cradled in this grace.

– Kelly Sauer, May 12, 2004

I tell myself that I won’t be here forever. That this lamentation is not who I am. That the three words He gave me – breathe, open, receive – are the hardest words I’ve tried to live, and none of them about the trying.

I hardly believe it when someone tells me that they love me anymore. I went through stacks of cards and notes yesterday, people telling me they loved me, telling me who I was, who I am. It’s not enough to hear it, and there seems no proof strong enough to convince me, at least on my bad days when the barometric pressure drops and the world falls apart for no reason at all.

But I have these gifts, the ones who love me, who reach out in spite of me to give from who they are and live into my world and I hold them and I look at them, not knowing what to do with them.

I keep hoping for another chance to do things right, to be what I’m supposed to be, what I think everybody else thinks I should be, but time always runs out on my mess.

I look at God with all the hollering voices raining down on me like some storm and He stays so very still and says nothing at all, but I can feel Him near. I am not angry enough to rail at Him – I haven’t been for a long time – but I feel too tired to stand before Him with my questions now, too tired to even kneel, so I sit up and lean back and fall down and we’re getting nowhere, He and I, because I can’t pick up and live the grace I know.

And yet, I wonder if somehow I am living it, and I’m not meant to be more than I am at the moment?

Every night, I tell them “God loves you more than we ever could,” and even as I say it, I wonder how those words will play when their world grows old and they have known loss and longed for intimacy.

I am so weary today. There are things that cycle around my life and my relationships that have come back up, and I want to run away, to hide from it all, come back a better person. But it’s becoming apparent that in this place there is no way out but through, and I struggle, wondering if even “through” will bring me to the other side, when I will be able to hold the gifts and enjoy what God gives without looking over my shoulder, waiting for the ball to drop.

I’ve been dealing with depression, anxiety, and panic attacks lately, so much so that I have pulled back on the intensity of my treatment. Convulsions I can handle. Panic I cannot.

We’re waiting for Irene to pass us here, and with the first spin she made over my house, I felt as though my heart might come out of my chest, as the helpless tears squeezed out the way they did when Piper was born. “Not alone,” my heart whimpered. “I hate the storms…” I hate when the light goes out and dark comes in during the daytime, hate when the wind flies through a world more fragile than I know, hate the pounding sound of wind-whipped rain on my windows.

The barometric pressure drops; the bottom drops out of my carefully-measured calm.

When you’re a child, it’s easy to believe that Someone Bigger cares about you and about the things that matter to you. Before you get picked up and thrown around by life, before you learn not to say the true things, before God doesn’t do what you think He should do, before you’re really old enough to think He should do anything at all.

You expect big things of God, because He can, because He has; you don’t doubt that He can come through.

And then He doesn’t, and He doesn’t because He wants you to look at Him and not at the pony you prayed for, because He is a Rewarder of those who seek Him, because He is their very great Reward.

So you wrestle with Him like Jacob, and demand that He bless, when all the time perhaps He only wanted a conversation, and when it is over and you limp away, you don’t even know why you were wrestling in the first place.

I feel less than a person and too much of a person. I write myself off, my old self who trusted so easily, my new self who doesn’t trust much at all, the dreams and the passion and the ideals I had. I know things now I wish I’d never found out. I want to go back to the safest places, places that are gone now. I don’t want to grow up. I want to stay young, to have the dreams and the optimism that carry hope around with them.

Getting out of bed in the morning, hugging my children, talking with my husband, taking pictures: these are my small acts of faith. It does not feel like enough, but it is all I can do with surety that I live them true from my heart. The rest overwhelms me.

So I wait in a holding pattern I can’t break for my limitations. It is this, I think, that grace is for.