Knowing how eyes can stay puffy from hours of crying. Knowing that there is this swollen, blood-shot evidence around the windows to the soul for a solid 24 hours. Knowing how the ache can settle deep into the marrow and muscles for days after the salty water has stopped dropping and how the heart feels tired of pumping. Knowing how the future seems long, and impossible, and struggle-filled.
I stared at it because of the other loved one I've been grieving with. Because even though all the painful pieces can be glued together into a bright smile for the surface-observers it shatters easily when the day slips into darkness and you crawl exhausted into bed and wrap up in thick loneliness and loss and lack and change.
This kind of lingering grief can be hard to see unless you've lived it... easy to forget unless you are living it.
I may try to pick up my cross daily but some days I feel the dying of being nailed to it and sometimes I just honestly don't know how to even keep breathing.
So if you are suffocating today under grief, or loneliness, or the painful process towards holiness and your real home... please let me spoil the end of the story for you.
Let me tell you what you really have to look forward to.
Let me sum up the words of that note that are the CPR to us who are nearly crushed under all life's weight and are gasping for truth:
Love wins.
It is because of this truth that I can take a deep breath... even if I just use it to cry out.
This is how life wraps up, plays out, and you and I can breathe this in and breathe this out until our minds are renewed with this truth. And we must.
When it all looks despairingly bleak... because in all raw honestly it currently is... let this truth take your heart in gentle waves.
Love. Wins.
Put it on a poster. Make it your screen saver. Say it out loud, friend. As often as your soul needs to hear it. And tell this today to someone else you notice is grieving?
Love wins!
No comments:
Post a Comment