With ten minutes left in the day, I wandered around the back of the buildings and found that the trail down to the river was little more than a snow covered space amongst bare trees. I slid and skidded my way down the embankment, around the corner.
My rock is covered with snow, so I settle down on my haunches, hugging my knees to my chin and rocking slowly. The water used to lap up against the rock, now it's frozen 10 feet down the bank. The river is a clean white highway through a dirty city.
In the serenity of the approaching evening I close my eyes for a moment, desperately seeking a place of peace. Slowly my spinning mind settles down, stops, and I'm in that place, the place that I so seldom take the time to visit. The place where I can hear God.
"I don't want....... this." What do I mean? I don't know...... mediocrity? Godless plans? Struggling for a survival I should be trusting for? I'm not a prophet and I'm not strong..... I can't know what my life is supposed to be and I don't know if I can pull it off. I keep trying to work it all out.... but I can never see it. I suppose if I could, I wouldn't need God, and He can't let that happen......
What do I want? So many things, so much less than I have and yet so much more. I want to know that I am living out my purpose each day. I want to feel confident that the course I'm following is a result of my love for God and not my self-serving ambitions.
As my legs began to fall asleep I stood up, and as I did, I felt unusually tall. I looked down at the jagged stumps of drowned trees peeking out of the bank below me, the snow covered rocks, my feet way down at the ends of my legs..... it seemed a long way down at that point, but as I looked south, to where the sky was turning pink in the sunset, and then north, to where the highway crossed the river, I suddenly felt very very small.
Indeed, I recieved a revelation of my vast puniness on this gigantic globe jam packed with humans and suddenly the fears and concerns that have been nagging me seemed to push me down into the rock I was standing on until I was just a tiny tiny speck peering out of wide eyes at a world both beautiful and terrible.
Sometimes life terrifies me. Everything about it. A comfortable but meaningless life terrifies me. A meaningful but torturous life terrifies me. Years and years of this same bullshit circling me like a perverse buzzard just waiting to pluck my eyes out, scream in my ears and leave for dead in a nursing home...... and I have no control, I never will, no one does, no say in whether I live or die, and though I fight all my life for what I think is right, the sheer magnitude of the world and everything on it will always find me standing still and small on a riverbank somewhere wondering what the hell I'm doing, and why, and how I hope to ever become more than I am without my hand placed firmly in His?
There is no life aside from Him, yet He seeks my death. It's all too big, and I'm far too small. There's just too much that I want, too much that I don't understand.
I cried there on the riverbank, tears freezing on my face. But I wasn't cold, and I felt better. All of a sudden it felt okay to be a speck, it felt free. How is it possible, I asked myself, that though I can't carry the world, I have taken it on my shoulders and then blamed myself for not fixing it? I can't even blame anyone for that, I did it myself, out of some misplaced arrogance, and then I stressed myself out about it, and now here I am, yet again, laying down burdens that don't belong to me.
God, after all, is BIG. Let Him handle it. And let Him handle me. He knows where I'm going, even when I don't.
My rock is covered with snow, so I settle down on my haunches, hugging my knees to my chin and rocking slowly. The water used to lap up against the rock, now it's frozen 10 feet down the bank. The river is a clean white highway through a dirty city.
In the serenity of the approaching evening I close my eyes for a moment, desperately seeking a place of peace. Slowly my spinning mind settles down, stops, and I'm in that place, the place that I so seldom take the time to visit. The place where I can hear God.
"I don't want....... this." What do I mean? I don't know...... mediocrity? Godless plans? Struggling for a survival I should be trusting for? I'm not a prophet and I'm not strong..... I can't know what my life is supposed to be and I don't know if I can pull it off. I keep trying to work it all out.... but I can never see it. I suppose if I could, I wouldn't need God, and He can't let that happen......
What do I want? So many things, so much less than I have and yet so much more. I want to know that I am living out my purpose each day. I want to feel confident that the course I'm following is a result of my love for God and not my self-serving ambitions.
As my legs began to fall asleep I stood up, and as I did, I felt unusually tall. I looked down at the jagged stumps of drowned trees peeking out of the bank below me, the snow covered rocks, my feet way down at the ends of my legs..... it seemed a long way down at that point, but as I looked south, to where the sky was turning pink in the sunset, and then north, to where the highway crossed the river, I suddenly felt very very small.
Indeed, I recieved a revelation of my vast puniness on this gigantic globe jam packed with humans and suddenly the fears and concerns that have been nagging me seemed to push me down into the rock I was standing on until I was just a tiny tiny speck peering out of wide eyes at a world both beautiful and terrible.
Sometimes life terrifies me. Everything about it. A comfortable but meaningless life terrifies me. A meaningful but torturous life terrifies me. Years and years of this same bullshit circling me like a perverse buzzard just waiting to pluck my eyes out, scream in my ears and leave for dead in a nursing home...... and I have no control, I never will, no one does, no say in whether I live or die, and though I fight all my life for what I think is right, the sheer magnitude of the world and everything on it will always find me standing still and small on a riverbank somewhere wondering what the hell I'm doing, and why, and how I hope to ever become more than I am without my hand placed firmly in His?
There is no life aside from Him, yet He seeks my death. It's all too big, and I'm far too small. There's just too much that I want, too much that I don't understand.
I cried there on the riverbank, tears freezing on my face. But I wasn't cold, and I felt better. All of a sudden it felt okay to be a speck, it felt free. How is it possible, I asked myself, that though I can't carry the world, I have taken it on my shoulders and then blamed myself for not fixing it? I can't even blame anyone for that, I did it myself, out of some misplaced arrogance, and then I stressed myself out about it, and now here I am, yet again, laying down burdens that don't belong to me.
God, after all, is BIG. Let Him handle it. And let Him handle me. He knows where I'm going, even when I don't.
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