God is Bigger Than Your Shit

We are ash and clay and dirt. God-breathed souls in crumbling mortal bodies.

Why do we wonder that life is hard? Life is unrelenting, impassive, and heedless to our grief. It simply happens, as the waves on the ocean happen. We are along for the ride, children on a playground merry-go-round, and it is spinning with a furious intensity until the shouts of glee become shrieks of terror . Sometimes we are flung to the ground by the violence of the movement, dirt upon dirt, hitting hard and laying still to ascertain the damage before rising once more to cling again to the bars with the peeling paint, hands sweaty and metallic from the gripping.

Sometimes the motion is gentler…kinder…and the breeze in our hair and the thrill of the spinning keeps us well pleased to stay.

Mostly, though, I find it is the former experience. Why is that so? Because I was born melancholic? Because I think too much? Because the particular cocktail of chemicals in my brain is less confectionary delight and more science lab experiment gone awry? Because I make it so? Am I the one spinning the blasted thing; somehow spinning and riding at the same time?

I don’t know. Maybe.

Mostly, I’m just tired. I’m tired of platitudes and exhortation. I’m tired of abrupt sorrow and unpleasant surprises. I don’t like surprises, even nice ones. A surprise, in essence, is not nice because its very nature is to startle, which I do not care for. I’m tired of dreams that vanish as quickly as they appear, of hopes that require too much energy to maintain. I want things to just make sense, dammit.

Truthfully, I would like just one thing to make sense.

But what makes sense to dust? Dust cannot comprehend complexity. Dust simply sits, being dusty. Dirt is dirty. Earth is earthy. It is weak stuff. Crumbles in the hand with the slightest pressure. Add water and the right combination of material and you might get brick, or concrete, or adobe, which is another matter.

But I am just dust. Says so right here. And somehow, that thought comforts me. It tells me that I don’t have to understand, that I am not expected to understand. There will be no final exam to this life, no entrance exam for the next. I can just be. And as I am beaten and pounded by life, if I can allow myself to be augmented and built up by my experiences, then one never knows.

Something beautiful might grow out of me. Something lovely might remain.

And that makes some sense.

Tonight I walked with my husband in the deepening dusk to the store and bought ice cream bars–only ice cream bars–the best ice cream bars that I have ever had, and we ate them as we walked back home and talked, hand in ice cream bar in hand in ice cream bar.

Tonight I got angry with two of my boys. They were fighting, and I sent them to bed. I went in afterwards and kissed and explained; sought and gave forgiveness.

Tonight I laid with my ear against my 2 year old’s back as he breathed deep and his blinks grew slower and farther apart. I heard the whoosh of air in lungs, the gurgle of belly and the whisper of infant words through the walls of flesh and bone. His warmth became my own and I saw the baby he once was becoming the little boy of today, and tomorrow.

Today I tried to encourage, felt the pain of one child’s heart, laughed with another, reprimanded, exhorted, embraced, loved.

And now, I cry, tears splashing wetly on my desk as I sit.

They say tis better to have loved and lost, but I want to know are you sure? I want to grab Tennyson by his lapels and demand Are you sure?? With certainty, say it! Prove to me that all of this, all flesh, all life–all that you hold dear and close–all that could be extinguished as quickly as breath blows candle flame on a birthday cake–is worth the risk!

People say I am blessed to have found love, blessed that I have so many around me to love, so many reasons to love, so many who love me…but I am not sure; I am not sure, and I admit it.

Are you sure that stopping to listen to heartbeat and breath is worth the agony that missing it will bring? If I never shared a walk in evening air, never stopped to discipline, never laid ear to ribcage; if I never looked into child eyes and listened to child prayers and comforted child grief, then what would I have to miss if it ever went missing?

Is it not better to keep oneself solitary, shut up like a hermit crab in the sand, alone against the wide world, without the care that loving brings? Would it not be easier…simpler…safer?

Yet Love is but a wily jade,
and tests both moat and barricade
it steals in softly through the chink
to push you cruelly off the brink…

It is not safe, this loving. It is a dangerous business. Yet before you know it, before you can exert caution, the thing is done and the loving has occured. And then the loss comes, as it always will, and we flounder. We are overwhelmed, surprised, shocked, by the very thing–the one thing–that is certain in all of life: death. We know it is coming. We see it in the seasons. We read it in the news. We watch it touch others, and yet when it dares to approach us, we are…angry. Amazed. Horrified. Distraught. Destroyed.

Grief does not feel like blessing.

I don’t know the answer. I still grapple with these thoughts; I wrestle and struggle and bleed and weep over the what ifs and the why nots and the outright damn it all to hell why must it be so?

My heart, oh my heart. It has been laid so very bare by this life. It has been opened and its contents spread across the pages of the years in a great messy smear. Is it pain, or love? Is there a difference? Make me strong I demand of God. Make me strong, to withstand this life! Yet He sees fit to perform this open heart surgery without anesthesia, and I am on the table writhing.

What is strength? Is it being untouched, or being touched in all ways, and leaning ever deeper into His scalpel?

He carves my heart with the thinnest blade; He slices and whittles and comes closer and closer to what I am clinging to, and His scalpel is Love. But it feels like pain.

And again, I ask…is there a difference?

Life is super busy right now. If you are waiting for a new post, it might be a while. BUT while you wait, here is an absolutely splendid bit o’ truth for your digestion.