To Anyone Hurting,

I've got at least 20 unpublished blogs in this site.  All started based on a catalyst of joy or heartache, but mostly the latter.

This one is no different.

It's been nearly two months since the incident.  It came swift, it came ruthlessly, and it ripped a hole in my chest that I am still trying to control the bleeding to.  I lost something dear to me, and now I'm just trying to make it through the "I feel like I'm dying" phase.

I relate it all to a war movie scene where a bomb goes off and the main character's hearing gets dulled into this low-volume, high-pitched ring and the camera goes in a sort of hazed slow-motion manner.

http://alphalewolf.tumblr.com/post/53467940950/your-mother-and-i-were-as-much-a-product-of-the

 But you know the main character is going to be all right at least for the next few moments because no main character dies in the low-volume, high-pitched, slow-motion shot.  They die after everything picks back up again.  When the shock of it all has passed and the raw grasp of what just happened comes and slams them in the face, that's when you really need to worry.

I ache with this loss.  I find it difficult to get out of bed, begging God to give me a break.  "Lord!" I cry, "don't let me go through this.  Let me wake up and it all be a dream.  Let the last piece of my life be a bad dream and let me wake up and be grateful for what I have and thankful that that nightmare was just that--a nightmare."

But I haven't woken up.  Every morning, I am stabbed in the chest with an alarm clock telling me to face another day I'm not ready to face, and honestly, sometimes don't think I'll ever be completely ready to face it.  I don't want to.
"How long did it take you to get over feeling like this?" I ask people who tell me they've experienced what I'm going through.
"Oh!  It took me years!" they say.  I can't do this for years.  I'm not strong enough to do this for years.  "Lord, deliver me!  Please, deliver me or kill me, but don't force me through this."  (I am kind of a child sometimes).  Each time I've begged for a pulmonary embolism, fatal heart arrhythmia, or aneurysm, He's said no.  The only evidence I have for this is my lack of any of these moralities thus far.

If you are experiencing anything like that--if you can't eat, can't sleep, can't think without feeling the shards of a broken heart piercing the pericardium that used to contain it--it is my most sincere prayer that you will find solace in knowing you aren't alone.
No, this season is not without purpose no matter how it may feel.  Want lessons?  I'm giving lessons.

1.  You have to believe what you know,  and not just what you feel.

http://divampire.tumblr.com/post/21976362967/listening-to-michael-bubl

Sometimes, it doesn't feel like God is good.  It doesn't feel like today is worth going through.  It doesn't feel like this season will ever come to a close, but I am being continually reminded by people around me that it does end.  The depression lifts.  The breakup stops cutting you like a knife.  The job gets better.  God comes through, even if it doesn't feel like He will.  Take encouragement from Hosea, where a people so fallen from God had to endure what sounds like hell on earth, but He always promises to come through on our behalf for His glory.
My biggest tip here is to reflect back on when God has come through for you in the past.  Psalm 26:3 says, "for I have always been mindful of your unfailing love and have lived in reliance on your faithfulness." Of course it's not always easy to think back to blessings when you feel like your life is in shambles, but take it one step at a time.  This is not a race.  Remember things one-by-one and keep a record of them.  When you're alone and the weight of the world starts crushing you again, pull out that record and play it over and over, reminding yourself of exactly who is carrying you.



2.  The world is full of beautiful people...

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/5c/cd/f4/5ccdf489dbb4087129f78da9fb3912a1.jpg

...who will hold you while you ugly-cry, who will cry with you, who will be angry on your behalf, who will gently redirect you back to a path that does not lead to bitterness or resentment, but rather growth and healing.  Find these people (or be open to letting them find you), and hold on.  Speaking of...


3.  Holding on is easier when you visualize it.
I feel like I'm in the middle of the ocean during a hurricane, and I'm drowning.

http://anelectricant.tumblr.com/post/122202245276/im-drowning

Visualizing a fishing hook that I'm holding onto helps when I need to remind myself who I'm holding onto.  I call it my "Jesus hook" because I can.  Yes, at times it is small, and the hook part hurts a bit, but I know if a fish can get forcibly reeled in, then a willing participant shouldn't be too much of a problem for the Creator of the Universe to pull from these murky depths, right?  As long as I've got that hook, the fisherman on the other end is going to keep His end of the bargain.

4.  Healing is not linear.

http://blogs.psychcentral.com/success/files/2013/10/typical.jpg

I hate this one.  It upsets me to no end, but there is also no avoiding its truth.  When someone experiences a severe physical trauma (a car accident, for example), the immediate pain is excruciating and the future is terrifying, but everyone thinks that as soon as you get to the hospital, the rest is downhill.  Hate to burst the bubble, but prolonged immobilization or a long bone fracture are high risk factors in blood clots, and the compound fracture you're probably babying has a very good chance of becoming infected.  Emotional healing is not always linear, either.  You have good days, and bad days, and ok days and, days you wish never existed, and days that make you wonder why you've ever cried.  It's ok to not feel ok at a certain milestone.  Congratulate yourself for the milestone and muscle through to the next.  You can, I promise.


5.  Take some time to be alone with the pain.

I hate this more than number 4.  (So sorry about all the physical metaphors, but that's just how I process stuff.)  When people get burned too severely or scrapped up too harshly, the medical procedure to heal that injury is something called "debriedment," where the patient is forced to have the comfortable layer of infected or defective slough removed from the wound, exposing the raw tissue underneath in order to give that tissue an opportunity to repair itself, and it can be quite painful (look it up if  you want, but I'm a nurse now and can say that kind of crap without a citation).

For me, the alone-time in the company of my pain is usually in the shower, where everything else is crying, so I probably should too.  

Take the time to say "this sucks and I don't want to take another second of it!"  Cry it out if you have to.  Scream into a pillow.  Run until your lungs give out.  Just give weight to the fact that you ache, because believe me when I say that pain has a way of making a forced entrance if not welcomed in for a brief visit every now and again.


I'm about to sound like everyone who has tried to encourage me in the past couple of months (and at times, I have resented them a little), but this will pass.  Each day gets a little easier, and by the time two weeks has rolled around, you realize you don't spontaneously burst into tears.  At three, you don't dwell on the loss as much as you initially did.  At four, you don't cradle the hurt as often (these may go in a different series and at different times for you).  Instead, you take on a new awareness of God's provision in your life (be it a new job, new friends, a knack for obsessive baking).  You lean on people you never realize cared.  You discover things about yourself that you never considered before.  And over time, the clouds roll back just a little further.

"so that those who dwell at the ends of the earth are in awe at your signs. You make the going out of the morning and the evening to shout for joy."  Psalm 65:8

It Is Well With My Soul

My soul hurts sometimes.  That's a strange thing to say, but it's the only way I know to describe it.  My body feels weak.  My heart trembles as though each beat just may be too overwhelming for it's broken fibers.

I have tried to be a harder, colder person.  I've wanted to keep emotions suppressed and pressured until they turn to stone, never again to affect me so profoundly.  But I have an impressionable soul.  I feel things with an intensity so strongly at times that I fear I may cave in on myself, collapsing into a black hole in the middle of my chest to be stretched through anguish and heartache indefinitely.  But after a while, it is as though my mind is too overwhelmed by the multitude of anxiety ridden questions about what I did to deserve this hurt, and everything shuts off.
The black hole stops swallowing me, and I am suspended in a time of trans-like existence.  I like to refer to this time as my "Emergency Reset."  Physically, everything is going just as it needs to, but my head is a barren wasteland, and my soul aches with the residual from the reset nuke.

My soul aches.

I may or may not have an old hymnal
 taking up space on my bookshelf.

I read a biography about Horatio Spafford, author of the hymn "It Is Well With My Soul."  He was a privileged lawyer who lived in Chicago with his wife--Anna--four daughters, and a son.  He invested a substantial amount of his wealth in some real estate north of Chicago, but in 1871, the Great Fire of Chicago destroyed his investment.  In 1873, he put his wife and daughters on the S. S. Ville du Havre, while he stayed behind at the last minute to attend to some more estate business, but yet another tragedy struck.  The ship was struck at sea and his daughters died.  Anna sent a telegraph back to her husband:  "Saved alone.  What shall I do..."
Three years later, Horatio's son was born, but at four years old, the boy died.
In spite of all of this, Horatio wrote a hymn that continues to be sung to this day.

"When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,

When sorrows like sea billows roll; 

Whatever my lot, Thou hast taught me to say

It is well, it is well with my soul"

Spafford wrote this following the death of his daughters, as he sailed across the Atlantic to bring Anna back.  In the midst of a loss as profound as losing his children, he acknowledged God's faithfulness and our call to remember His sovereignty.

In the book of Job, a man who also experienced great loss swallowed the lamenting he did in chapter 3 where he says, "let the day perishh on which I was to be born" (Job 3:3), and instead shifts his focus to the glory and majesty of God, proclaiming:

"As for me, I know that my Redeemer lives,

And at the last He will take His stand on the earth.

Even after my skin is destroyed,

Yet from my flesh I shall see God."

(Job 19:25-26)

In times of trial and heartache, it is important to accept that we hurt.  It reminds me of a song by twenty one pilots, where the lead says "sometimes you gotta bleed to know/that you're alive and have a soul" ("Tear In My Heart").  I'm not saying we've got to go around kicking doors and stubbing toes in order to know that our nerve endings are functioning efficiently enough for us to be deemed living, but that it's all right to know that something is causing us pain.  The danger, however, is sitting in that state of mind for too long.  It becomes a poison, and the longer we dwell, the harder it is to avert our eyes to the One who offers the very peace we seek (Romans 5:1).  

However, I must be honest here.  That peace doesn't always come the moment we ask.  Sometimes these trials double as a lesson in patience, and if I'm being frank here, my patience is one of those Fruits of the Spirit that I've been neglecting for a while.  

If you're going through something--anything that's causing your soul to ache--it is my hope that you will take some time to shift your gaze from the ache to the Lord.  Glorify Him instead of the trial.  I'm not saying it will fix everything immediately or that everything will be hunky-dory.  That's not what we, as followers of Christ have been promised, but we are promised that we are not alone (Matt. 28:20).  We are promised that "God caused all things to work together for the good to those who love God, to those who are called according to His purpose" (Romans 8:28), even our suffering:

"Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of mercies and God of all comfort, who comforts us in all our affliction, so that we may be able to comfort those who are in any affliction, with the comfort with which we ourselves are comforted by God. For as we share abundantly in Christ's sufferings, so through Christ we share abundantly in comfort too."

(2 Corinthians 1:3-5 ESV) 

So breathe.  

Rally whatever energy you have.

Remember the sovereignty and mercy and grace of God.

And let it be well with your soul.