If you look for truth,

If you look for truth,

you may find comfort in the end;

if you look for comfort

you will not get

either comfort or truth

only soft soap

and wishful thinking to begin,

and in the end, despair.

C.S. Lewis

This past week has been one battling all the normal angst of newly-weddedness:

• Working overtime while my husband only has part time work.
• Feeling lost in McPherson and missing my parents, my friends, my community.
• Being prodded in therapy to bring to the open the festering sore in my soul.
• Wanting children and still not pregnant…

In an attempt to self-medicate I have been devouring books instead of feeling. Literary escapes have given me sanctuary from the “too-much” of real life from time to time, but after about a week I have to switch it off because-

I really do want to feel.

Even if it hurts.

This binge on books has kept me from writing this small while. There are a million abstractions [whispered thoughts and feeling] bottled inside me, screaming to be brought into the concrete light of paper and ink.

Anger.

Frustration.

RAGE.

….. Exhaustion.

But my heart is tired. To write is to hope, and right now I have only a clingy desperation and a frantic prayer for holiness.

Holy Spirit,

Help me.

I face an overwhelming, deep-seated anger.

I have recognized in the face of this giant rage my Goliath,

A challenger who will require me to trust God

[though He leads me into the dangerous places.]

But to trust the core of my being must learn to believe that He will work powerfully to set me free from my tormentor so that,

like the shepherd boy,

I too can serve Him.

It’s so clear to me as I write that the problem isn’t that Tim hasn’t found a job, or that I am desperately homesick for the Vineyard, but the wounded child within me who cries and won’t be comforted by books, money, friends, or family. Though I prayed and confessed with the zealous fervor of a girl facing emotional death, the standoff between my spirit and this rage boiling deep in me has lasted all these years.

How deep has rage sunk her claws into this wounded heart?

How deep?

How long until I’m free?

I want something different. With fingers clasped tightly around Tim’s love for me, I have let escape slip out of my hands. I have returned my fiction to the library and returned to the world. A world where my husband encourages me- “Sarah I don’t want to be married to a robot. Your passion, your deep emotion , is a beautiful piece of your heart. Let me into all your heart, my bride.”

At the same time Holy Spirit has been whispering Sara Groves lyrics in my ear-

You may lose your appetite,
your guiding sense of wrong and right.
You may lose your will to fight,
but you cannot lose my love.

Again I discover in the deep hurting, Love is deeper.

How can I respond? I have been drawing. I have been meditating on promises from His word that seem too good to be true. I have been crying -

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties

and regard them as a defect of faith

but they are afflictions, not sins.

Like all afflictions, they are,

if we can so take them,

our share in the passion of Christ.

C.S. Lewis