What breaks us can often be the simple, the unexpected, perhaps seemingly random occurrences that cross our paths.
I haven't cried in a long time. That may not be unusual for some people, but for me it is a bit abnormal. I usually get weepy at the slightest excuse and my heart is generally very tender. I started to notice recently. It's not that I am not sentimental. But even when I watched the end of Toy Story 3 and was very touched, I wasn't reaching for a tissue like I usually would. I realized then I had slipped a bit into numbness.
The past couple weeks I've been carrying a mild level of anger around. It kept rising to the surface in the little things that normally wouldn't upset me so much. I kept blaming it on different surface events but I knew what was underneath it all. The problem was, I couldn't do anything about it. God kept showing me something I didn't want to see. I acknowledged it and wanted to move on. There was nothing I could do about it, nothing I could do to change it in anyway. But He kept saying it to me over and over. And I got to the point of extreme frustration with Him. "What do you want with me? Why do you keep drawing my attention to something so incredibly painful? Why do you keep showing me?"
So this afternoon I finally had it out with him. Matt took the girls to the pool for a bit, and I stayed back thinking my legs were in need of a shave before I joined him. But there it was, right in my chest. So finally, in exasperation, I sat alone on my living room floor with Sam pacing around me because he wasn't sure what was happening, and I began to pray in my prayer language. And the Holy Spirit began to lead my human spirit into the place of the pain. Deeply into it. And I wept. Like I haven't wept in a long time. Then I realized that God wanted my heart to feel what He had been telling me, not just acknowledge His words, and for some reason I wasn't able to do that on my own. I needed to feel the pain before He could heal it.
As I felt the pain it was as if a jar of ointment broke open inside of me and absorbed all the pain. I sat in peace in a sort of wonder (and Sam settled down) and the thought that came to my mind was this...I have no idea what that was really about, but I know that the Holy Spirit is the Counselor. And I will continue to entrust myself into His hands. It's so amazing to me how He knows exactly where to touch me to open me up, and He knows exactly how to lead me toward healing. Certainly I would have chosen to walk away from the pain, not toward it. And He knows how to keep His finger on it until we break. It reminded me of something that happened a few years ago. I had forgotten about it, but the other day I was reading through my journals looking for something I had written, and I came upon it. It's a story about Matt, and how God broke him open in tenderness toward his daughters. I wrote it in my journal almost exactly two years ago, and I thought maybe I would share it with you today.
Matt had taken the girls over to the pool while I fixed dinner. I told him dinner would be ready at 5:30 and specifically asked him not to be late. The pool is just across the parking lot at the back of our house. At 5:40 Matt wasn't home, so I went out on the back deck to call him. I could see him walking around the grass field inside the pool grounds. I called over to him and motioned him to come home. He looked at me a little strangely, but nodded. A couple of minutes later he and the kids were walking across the parking lot and I went over to meet them. Matt was visibly upset and started shaking his head. He saw me coming toward him and said, "Don't even look at me."
"Why?" I asked wondering if I had done something to upset him.
"Don't look at me or I'm going to cry," he answered.
I asked him if something had happened and he nodded. He was in a daze, like there were all these intangibles that he just couldn't get a handle on, something bigger going on that he just couldn't quite discern, and he kept saying over and over again, "I don't know why I'm so upset about this." He kept trying to rationalize it. "It must be my anxiety. I don't know why this is affecting me like this."
So, still not understanding what was going on, I brought everyone inside and gave the girls something to do.
Matt sat on the couch and was literally shaking. He told me then that a little 10 year old girl had lost her necklace and locket at the pool. She had taken the whole day off from school to look for it. Her dad's ashes were in it. Matt broke then and cried and I started to cry with him, feeling his pain for her. He said, "If that were my little girl, I would like someone to help her find it."
He held me for the longest time and I said, "I know, I know." I felt the Spirit of God working in it all.
We sat for about 10 minutes, he kept looking at me, and asking me why he was so upset, like I could explain it to him. I just shook my head. All I knew, is that in that tender place in His soul the Lord was doing important work. And I knew that my daughters were deeply loved by their father.
Matt went over later and looked for that locket. He walked the entire field. He never found it. But I was glad he cared enough to keep looking. My guess is, the Spirit of God walked with him.
I think I need to go find me a box of tissues.
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