It's been so long that I had to try a number of times to get my password right. But I figure my readership has died down enough now that few would actually see this post, thus making it what it once was:  a semi-secluded spot to puke uncontrollably from fear and discouragement.

  I didn't think I'd ever come back here.  There wasn't any point.  Either some people gave too much of a shit when I wrote, and most everyone else couldn't give two shits if I did.  That leaves a shit in between, which pretty much sums up where I am these days.
 
  It was a terribly tumultuous summer, both inside and out.  It never ceases to amaze me that most folks think "oh, everything's fine" when they see me on Sunday morning or another context.  You know what that is, though?  Because when all is said and done, I'm a fucking professional, and it's not about me in circumstances where my personal problems are causing me to bleed dry from within.  I cannot striptease my pain in front of the flock because there are only a few who would understand--and, unfortunately, a few who would be sent into valleys of their own because they are the ones by whose hands I have suffered.  So I will not let them know.  I will only swallow the pain as I swallow painkillers.  I will hide behind my blandest smile.  I will mouth platitudes.  I will offer prayer.  But within, I am rotting away; my bones know no soundness.

  There are stories of how C.H. Spurgeon would get peeled from his bed by his church elders so that he could get up to preach, then would return to his bed once the service was over.  It wasn't exactly like that for me, but were it not for friends and yes, professional counselors, I don't think I would have bothered to leave my apartment at all.  The thing about being self-aware is that you end up doing whatever you can to divert deeper depression:  you keep exercising, you eat as best you can, and you try to get enough sleep.  But sometimes, it's not enough.  I've been taking sustained beatings over the last few months in many different ways, and it's still not all good.  In fact, over the last few days, I've been in the absolute shits.  I've realized in the last few months that I'm actually very good at hiding stuff when I want to, and, more frighteningly, awesome at playing the I'm-so-fucking-happy game.

  I slipped this summer.  Many times.  Into depression, out of depression.  Sometimes wondering why the hell I need to get up at all.  Sometimes wondering what the possible use of soldiering on could be. 

  I tried.  I tried!  I wanted and desired and prayed.  I don't think I ever wanted such a thing as I did when I prayed for this, the change of my wounded heart.  It was secret, it was furious, it was the work of a mountain lifting up its skirts and planting itself in the sea.  Yet, my cold heart warmed too late, too late.  So I am left behind, left alone, left holding the bag-- again.  The moment when my heart of stone became a heart of flesh is exactly the moment when it became vulnerable to being torn apart.  Story of my fucking life.  Why have a heart of flesh at all?  Is it not better to be what I have projected myself to be:  a stone monolith--uncaring, distant, yet strong?

  What for?  What for, this new pain?  Were it to make me compassionate, I mayhap would smile and say "good good", but all I feel now is bitterness and all that comes out of me is groaning.  Were it to cleanse me, as some had thought it would, all this has done is scar me even more deeply-- a surprising thing, since I was not aware of how open I had become.  What was all this striving for?  For naught, I should say, and even less than naught to a terrible hurt that I do not know what to do with.  Pain, pain, go away, come again another day.  Every day I wake up and am in pain, and the only way I know to alleviate it is to medicate mind and body.  And yes, I know you don't know what this is about, but I do, and for now, that's enough.  No one can know the seemingly innumerable hurts I have gone through in the last year, and even if they do, no one understands how I have processed them and felt worn down by every single stroke of the lash.  The first I could stand.  The second tingled.  The third I could feel my skin break.  By the tenth, I am left an incoherent, gibbering mess; sobbing into my wounds and begging for it to stop.  Enough! 

  I don't know why I'm writing here.  Maybe it's because I've written through the last dozen or so pages of my journal complaining to God.  Maybe it's because I spend every morning feeling my tongue curl with curses; and at night when I drift to sleep, my tongue cleaves to the roof of my mouth in sorrow.  Maybe it's because most of my friends probably couldn't stand a sustained barrage of f-bombs as I am prone to use when I'm angry or tired or discouraged or, in this case, all three.  More likely, it is the revelation of pain that most cannot stand.  You know, I think I just figured out why I'm writing here:  it's because in some weird way, it helps to have someone bear witness to your pain.

  I said as such to Cousin Ted and my buddy Phil last week when I held them in confidence.  I have other friends whom I may call, but I am afraid that they might be exhausted by the difficulty of caring for someone they love and so lapse into explanations.  It is not as though I really want theological answers that explain it all.  I can come up with enough myself!  It is the counselor in me remembering that this is my shit, and even though others are trying to walk with me, it's still my problem, not theirs.  They cannot bear my pain for me.  Only I can.  In that way, I am alone.  But all can bear witness, and this, dear reader (if you have read this far) is the boon I ask of you today:  bear witness.  I am laid low and silent, a shiftless shadow wandering the halls of Sheol.  Voiceless.  Sleepless.  Formless.  Bear witness!  I am a worm, not a man.

  I don't want theological answers.  I want to be loved through this, borne up by the reassurance of God's love for me.  God is good, you say?  Then I need proof!  I have felt the care of God in some ways:  if not by dint of my own flattened will, that struggles to rise like a prizefighter from the mat, then by the attendance of others to me; angels incarnate, those bearing the salve of pity and understanding.  Mockers say "oh, does the little boy need his pity party so badly?"  And I say "yes.  Only heartless bastards do not know what it means to live with a broken heart."  I have lived with mine for so long that very often I feel only as a quarter of a man, not even half-a-man, a speck of what I think I should be.  This long grief, this long sorrow-- it does not kill you, but it shrinks you, pulls you down into the corner of some dark box where there is no warmth and no light.

  I have only begun to ask the most dreaded question we all must eventually ask of our pain:  where is God in all this?  And for me, the pain is still too near, so I can only throw up my hands and say "hidden".  I wish it were as simple as feeling the comfort of His presence, but now, there is nothing.  Only the hum of my refrigerator and more silence beyond.  I do not know where God is in all this, because right now, it feels as though He is not in it at all and that He is asleep or uncaring.  And perhaps that is the best thing I have written thus far:  that perhaps God was not in this at all-- yet what I hope for is the redemption of this suffering.  Maybe not on this side of life, for it may well be that I will weep out the rest of my days, but maybe on the other side, when I am raised anew, all of the way this sorrow has carved me out will prepare me to become a vessel of some greater joy.

  I can only hope.  Right now, after having spent the evening doing my damnedest to drink myself into a stupor and then found, to my dismay, that my tolerance is much better than I thought it was-- this moment, I can only breathe.  And each breath draws the darkness nearer.  Yes, darkness, you are my closest friend.




 

 

  This is the way the world ends
  This is the way the world ends
  This is the way the world ends
  Not with a bang but a whimper

  --  T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men

  I've had this fragment of T.S. Eliot stuck in my head for the last few days, not really knowing why I should have such a thing in there to begin with.  The last time I read this poem was over a year ago, I think-- but strange how some things bubble up from our subconscious when we least expect it.

  Today was a difficult day.  I went from contentment to anger to bitterness to acceptance to gritted joy in the span of a few hours-- all because of money.  I am giving up the last of the "Smaug vintage", as Bilbo might say, and quite rightly so, for it is all that I have ever been able to save when I went "there and back again." 

  Giving it up means also giving up certain dreams, things that weren't really happening anyway.  I was hoping to use that money for another degree-- now, I don't think I'll have the money for that.  I was hoping to also use it for a wedding-- but I need not tell you how far that is from me as well.  No, the money was just sitting there, waiting to be used, and used it shall be-- and for good cause. 

  I didn't give it up easily, though.  I raged.  The first thing on my lips after I was confronted with this new poorer reality was fucking hell.  I thought "why me" and sucked my thumb.  I clenched my jaw until I thought my teeth would shatter in my mouth.  And then, I heard from God.

  It was as I was praying for someone else, it was as though God was challenging me on several different fronts, but the most important thing I heard was "some people need to be separated from their money."  It was something my old pastor and mentor in Hong Kong once said about other people, but something I turn over in my head.  However, this is what I usually mutter to myself as I watch congregants drive off in their nice cars to multi-million dollar houses on the West Side.  I didn't think that I, the poor church mouse, would need to be ever separated from my money.  Did I? 

  I guess I did.  Later, another pastor at the meeting I was at mentioned Abraham at Mt. Moriah, and it all became incredibly clear.  I was counting on that money for certain things-- for hope, for a future.  It is a subtle thing.  I was not, in one sense, depending upon God, but upon what He had provided.  The LORD giveth, and the LORD taketh away, n'est-ce pas?  And now, the decision on how to use it is taken from me, the burden of wealth no longer a part of my life.  Not because I still don't have the capacity to pay bills or go out for occasional lunches, but because the option of doing anything more than I regularly do is now gone.  That wealth was my Isaac, my hope for the continuation of a promise and a life. 

  Only this time, there was no ram in the thicket.  My dagger sheared into my own flesh and blood until I cut it away from me.  Quickly, quickly, quickly.  I did it quickly so I would not feel it so much, yet the feeling of leaning on emptiness is discomfiting to say the least.  Yet is it ever emptiness that I lean on?  Will God actually still provide?  Or is it really going to be like the Eliot poem-- "Not with a bang but a whimper."

  O God, I hope You show up here.  Not just for my sake, but You do realize people are watching, don't You?  If not for me, then for Yourself then!