Life consists of one question which, by comparison; makes all others insignificant: is God really good?
Lately I've been haunted by fears with no obvious endpoint. "What will I do one day when my parents?" “If I go blind will my friends stay?" "Will I always feel like this?" "Will I ever know love again?" "Even if I did, would I know how not to sabotage it?" "How will I hold on?"
Much of my life has been spent captive to such fears.
The road out begins at a place most only visit on the darkest of days.
After years of drowning in thought, years of banging on the walls of a white padded cell, pain trumps fear and a crack in reality opens. Finally, the desire for a new world destroys the pleasure of understanding it’s pieces. When finally, one desires to be free not right.
In this place we see a glimpse of our true state: that one's suffering is his personal Everest. His welcoming in by the spirit which; minute by minute, day by day, puts the highest peaks under foot.
As the crack fades, a voice returns shouting: "you're a nobody from nowhere whom no one would long miss." Though it wears many masks, this is the call of fear-drenched greed. Bent on spite and fueled by cowardice. It burns with resentment and welcomes each of us to curse God for giving us a life so low and yet somehow expecting gratitude.
But the call of Everest is the yearning for a beauty which does not yield to suffering. A humility unbroken by the cruel weight of our banal ordinariness.
A call to allow that, perhaps; our sufferings are both a tragedy and a kind of distinct honor.
That we may bear what must be bore and somehow; remain enchanted. For death and loss will take many things, but never take from us, a sense of the bizarre gift that we got to exist.
May God make it true of me.
Great article!
Beautiful. Thanks for sharing.