This could also be entitled 'Starting to piece myself back together again'.
Sorry to keep banging on about it, but as you may have gathered from earlier posts, this past couple of years have 'had their moments'. Life has been far from easy. It has felt as though I have kept being knocked down and getting up, only to be knocked down again.
Rinse and repeat.
There have been lots of conflicting emotions rattling around inside me. I have felt really down a lot of the time. That isn't new; I've been there before; it's an old feeling which lurks in the shadows waiting until I am weak; it likes to take up residence in the dark, broken, corners of my being and rob me of joy. It's not staying. I’ve never let it stay before - with God's help I always fight back against it sooner or later. The culmination of this period of 'bumping along the bottom', has been the spate of deaths, and the resulting grief.
It struck me the other day that we're not designed for death.
How so? Surely everyone dies? you say.
Let me try to explain.
When someone you've known and loved dies, it wrecks you.
It shakes you to the very core of your being.
It makes you feel as if you’re going mad, because the world you inhabited with them no longer exists, but you’re still living in something that looks exactly like it. Everything just feels wrong and seems out of place.
And that’s the point. It is wrong. We weren't meant for death. We were made to live beautiful, perfect, fruitful, lives, walking in step with the One who created us to enjoy Him. Then the plan got messed up; mankind rebelled against God and brought sin into the world. As it says in Romans 6:23:
For the wages of sin is death...
Everything around us, including our own physical bodies, was marred and became fragile and mortal and subject to decay and death, except for one thing.
Eternity is still etched on our souls.
That's what we were made for.
That's why death feels wrong.
...but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. Romans 6:23 (NIV)
So there is hope. Hope of redemption; hope of a 'putting right' of the wrongs; hope for healing of the wounds; hope that one day we will be in a really good place:
He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away. Revelation 21:4 (NIV)
As I said earlier, I've been down before, but I always fight back, with God's help - this time it's taken a fair while to get to a place where I had garnered enough strength and determination again - and that largely thanks to the ministry of several folk at the 'Landmark' conference I chattered on about in my previous post. More soon...
"Further up and further in" (C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle)