1 Corinthians 10:13 … transcending trials (01/10/14)
To all who suffer or have suffered:
To live is to choose to Love; to Love especially when you have no stomach for it — especially when everything you’ve ever held dear crumbles like burnt paper in your hands; crumbles to dust in front of your hopeful eyes. And you try to take a breath but your your throat is filled with the silt of your despair.
It’s to choose to Love even when grief is sitting right next to you, with its stank-steamy, tropical heat thickening the air around your mouth; air somehow heavier than water — more fit for gills than lungs.
It’s to choose to Love when grief weights you down like your own flesh, only more of it — lots more of it; a veritable obesity of grief … When all you can think, over & over again, is “How can I withstand this? How can I live through even this single empty now?”
And yet you DO choose to take that breath …
You DO choose to live through that moment …
You DO choose to reach out and take hold of life again.
And you take hold of it as if it were a child’s face resting gently between your palms –- a plain face, mind you; one with no sweet smile, no sapphire eyes, no charming lips. And you are holding this small, plain, almost-ugly face in your time of seemingly greatest sadness … You are holding it there and you are hurting and you would just as soon turn away and give up … And yet instead of this cowardly retreat you choose to smile upon that face instead, and softly say, “Yes, my child … I will take you with me. I will Love you again.”
That, my Friends, is what it means to truly Live; not to someday know a deeper joy or one day feel a contentment more lasting, but rather to be covered in your deepest pain and soaked in your most acute distortion of self, and yet choose to rise again and stride boldly forth into your next new day.
Amen … Let it be so.
(inspired by Ellen Bass)
“God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.” ~ 1 Corinthians 10:13
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