Waiting to Inhale

My heart is untidy of late.

That is, to be honest, the equivalent of falling from a 30 story building and asking for a bandage. It's messy in there. Dark, brooding, and uncertain.

This has been a very tough year. The toughest I've ever lived through-- am living through-- the sort where putting one foot in front of another becomes a task that begs reward. And there aren't rewards for that kind of thing, you know. Hearts are just supposed to beat. Inhaling and exhaling just happens. It's a root system for all the rest of it: underground support for the bright hot sun where real life blooms and flourishes.

But sometimes life deals a blow that knocks the petals to the ground. This year I experienced a betrayal I'd never really considered on the "before" side of things , and now that I'm living in the wake, I'm having to rebuild some things: my sense of self. My sense of faith. My sense of the church as an institution, and whether it does more good than harm.

I'm not doubting God, exactly, in that I don't doubt he exists. I feel his presence remotely, as through a glass darkly, but that's not enough for me, because there's a seed of something in me that longs to be recaptured. To be seized and held and reclaimed as God's own. To be reborn.

I read Barbara Brown Taylor's Learning to Walk in the Dark. I liked her take on lunar spirituality, and the life of faith without even the faintest hint of light. But this is like walking with no air, in the ash following a volcanic eruption that blocks out the sun and causes vegetation to wither.

Where is God in that aftermath?

In the midst of adolescence and its own unmakings I encountered Anne Frank, who told me that despite everything she'd experienced, people were good at heart. I find myself doubting her words of late, but bounce back to the fact that she lived the better part of two years locked in an attic.

How much air do I really need?

There are creatures who live yet barely move. They take in the bare minimum necessary to maintain their life processes. These are not nature's flamboyant jewels, mind you. They are generally tiny and ugly and live in caves.

Sometimes spirituality lives there, too-- in places and pockets so airless as to seem impossible.

I am inviting an unseen and increasingly hard to feel God to meet me here in a small, unthreatening way. To breathe what breath I can take in this near dormant form, until someday-- slowly-- ash takes form again. Is reformed, into something entirely new, yet still beloved.

If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay. Habakkuk 2:3b

Come quickly, Lord Jesus, and do not tarry.