Mon, Apr. 8
... I want far too much from you
It saddens me to discover that so many people, including myself, lead such double lives. I look at the number of people who have been "found out," so to speak, lately, and I find myself wondering if it's all really worth it. Do these people really care so little about the people they hurt? Does it really matter so little that they're being found out; that their carefully conctructed stories are coming down around them?
Perception is so much. Not everything, perhaps, but a lot. It is so much of what I think of you... and when I find something out that makes my perception of you change... it somehow changes everything. The way you talk, what you do, what you say, your smile, what you do when you go home away from the public eye... all of it changes, in my eyes. It may not be a right opinion, or a justified one, but it's my changing view nonetheless.
Much of what we struggle with today, we will still struggle with tomorrow and the next day. Some pains, whether the precisely-shaped pain of loss or the formless pain of unfulfilled longing, never go away. The wound will never heal completely, the problem never find a pure solution. We are offered instead the less satisfying but more realistic hope that God can redeem even the wound. (Reaching for the Invisible God, Phillip Yancey)
I'd never thought of it exactly that way before. I'd never actually thought through the different forms of pain and loss. There's some loss that is so intricately and precisely shaped, and I can tell you exactly what it is that I'm missing; exactly what it is that should be filling that space, but isn't. I could tell you, to the most minute detail, what the longing for that is. I can spell it out, but being able to identify it doesn't make the intensity any less.
On the other hand, there's some loss that's not even a loss because it was never fully realized in the first place. It's a vague pain, an emptiness that's very much there, but not specific enough to be able to say exactly what it is that I'm missing. It's just a void. An empty space waiting to be filled.
Both are equally painful. Both types of loss and unfulfillment are hard to deal with, and have the possibility to be at least somewhat debilitating. Both have the potential to produce a sharp, piercing pain, or a dull, constant ache. And both are equally real.
This is the place where I should go on to say, "But both are equally redeemable; both can be equally given to a loving God." I don't feel like saying that right now. The pain and the ache are too great to be able to give a happy-ending answer, even if it's a happy ending that has to be worked for. The loss is too much. The thought of having to wake up again tomorrow and face the same thing for one more day is just too much to deal with. I can't deal with the possibility of taking the pain and trusting God to redeem it.
At the same time, though, I have no choice. I have nothing else to do with it, so I find myself in a quandary. Do I trust in what I claim to believe in? Do I abandon what holds my faith? How do I keep it to myself so I can solve the problem my own way, or at least have something to sulk about when it doesn't go right, and still hand it over to God so that he can take the mess and the broken pieces and make something beautiful out of it? I can't. I can't have it both ways, and as long as I keep holding onto that little piece, I'm doing it my way by default.
God can redeem even the wound, but what beauty is there in an ugly scar? I want it to go away. I want the ache to be gone; the emptiness to be filled. I don't want to have simply a redeemed wound; I want to have the perfection I've never experienced. The perfection I never will experience, at least not in this life. I want too much, I think.
infinite || abyss
posted at 12:14 a.m.
