So I've been feeling out at sea lately. Unmoored.
I've felt this way many times before, and know now that it's about as necessary to existence as it is unpleasant. (I don't know, maybe that's pushing it a little. Perhaps there are reams of you out there who never feel like this? Maybe it's just INFPs like me trudging around like Gloomy McGloomypants while the rest of you jump through life like hyper toddlers? Well, pardon me if I go smoke behind the Bounce House.)
So this is just a thing that happens, and that doesn't make it any easier, but I guess it does mean it's more familiar. It doesn't feel hopeless to be at sea-- just sad.
"Sad, sad, sad, sad. Why must I be sad?" They Might Be Giants
"Why are you cast down, my soul, and why disquieted within me?"-- Psalm 42
So that's my favorite psalm now, in large part due to an assignment earlier this year from our Adult Forum at church. (It's basically Sunday school.) We were to read the first portion of the psalm and then write a second portion with identifiably Christian themes. What was my favorite psalm before this? Well, I didn't have one, so engaging with this one let it roar in to fill that vacuum, but come on now:
"As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God.My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?
My tears have been my food day and night, while people say to me continually, 'Where is your God?'"
That is some prime stuff, you get me? Some satisfying and depressing good stuff. Join me behind the Bounce House good.
But do you know what I discover, once the Psalmist gets back there? Once he squats on the curb with his dreads and Dead Milkmen t-shirt and accepts my light and we just nod and exhale and swear occasionally?
He says: "Hope in God; for I shall again praise him, my help and my God." Only he probably says it without the semicolon, and `maybe he kind of scat-raps it before he daps me with some lock-and-fly and shuffles off into the heat.
Life can suck like a mother, but I'll praise God anyway.
My grandmother used to say that when things got rough, you had to just "keep on keeping on," so that's what I do, even when I'm tired and the volume's turned down and the asphalt stretches on like a black hot wilderness.
I believe it will eventually get me somewhere, even if it's only to the other end of the parking lot.
5 comments:
This may cheer you up a bit: Momma may need to go to Richmond for some training in the summer, so I'll have an excuse to come spend a day with y'all. Also, when the Milkweeds decide to go to sea for realz, as in, take a cruise, let me know. It would be awesome to hang out on a big ol' Carnival boat with y'all. They have great kids' programs, too. Third, you could always call your dear ol' friend Tonya. Just saying. =P
Whoops. Just deleted my own comment, which basically said: BEST NEWS EVER!! I doubt we'll be doing any kind of cruise for a while-- need the clams for other endeavors-- but one day we'll do one. Some time far away in the inky, nebulous future.
Yup, amen. This reminded me of something I read on my friend Amy's blog today (here, if you're interested: http://www.amyseiffert.com/?p=2195). She was talking about grief. "Don’t let others turn the light on in your darkness. It’s not time to dream of what’s next until you take care of grieving. Grief is pay me now or pay me later. I’d prefer removing the rock in my shoe now, than taking care of a hip issue as I compensated for the rock in my shoe all those years I refused to grieve." I don't know if you're grieving, per se, but I thought I'd share. Love the psalms, though, and David's pattern of brutal honesty about his pain, coupled with the choice to put his trust in God even in the midst of it. I always read that "why are you downcast, my soul?" as though he's challenging himself and pointing himself back toward hope.
I love what your friend said and how she says it, Erin. I agree that with legitimate grief and pain, that's the way to go-- moving through it and experiencing it rather than tabling it for later.
In my case, I'd say that this feeling of being at sea = depressing navelgazing that does no one any good. My internal thermostat just has this setting on it, and I have to cycle through it (so there is a touch of that inevitability your friend speaks of), but it hit me while reading Ecclesiastes today that there is a remedy for all this "vanity, vanity, life is vanity" stuff: Jesus. Because I actually don't believe that everything is pointless and wasted time; I believe that there's good and excellent work given us to do with regards to alleviating suffering-- REAL suffering, and not the melancholies of a stay-at-home mother with a stable home and wireless Internet. So I need to just get out there and do it. The asphalt is not some kind of exhausting obstacle but pavement that I can hit running, and I love your interpretation of "why are you downcast" as a challenge or signpost pointing back towards hope.
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