Monday 24 April 2017

Heart Transplant

Every moment of anguish vacuums the joy out of the corners of my heart. Tears come or worse, they don't.  Pain gets deeper, breaths get shallower and I wish I had the words.  Any words, dammit.  

It feels empty.  But it isn't, is it?  My grief is not the absence of joy, it is the overwhelming loss of it.  The greater the joy was at the one end of the spectrum, the more encompassing the sorrow is at this end.  I want to wish away the pain, but I fear it would take with it the memories.  Maybe I can't live without either.  Because what-was was wonderful and what-is has to be.  

Truth be told, this isn't the first time I have wondered at His goodness.  Not the first time I have doubted His ways.  I didn't like it last time either or the time before, but oh my soul, did it tangle me up in my Father's love.  

Driven to my knees, sure that this time it was too much.  This time I might not see His glory again, His grace again.  How I long to be proven wrong by His faithfulness, because this time the only thing worse than being wrong is being right.  

It is hard.  Too hard, in fact.  But it is not over.  I refuse to believe this is the one situation He cannot redeem, that this is the one where He washes His hands of me and says 'you're on your own.'  

Most days I beg Him to take this burden from me.  To give me His yoke that is easy and His burden that is light.  Yet I know, in my heart of hearts, that He lets nothing go to waste in the shaping and perfecting of my faith.  I know because of the whispers.  Somedays I barely catch them as they float by on the rhythms of Your glory.  Somedays they arrest me in Your presence and I am known.  

The whispers find the cracks.  Lord, they pour and trickle and puddle in all the right corners of my heart.  And I know that this sorrow today, this is yet another fissure into which You spill Your whispers.  I know it even as I see that my words have morphed into whispers back to You.  

I don't want a heart transplant, I want to see what You do with this one You're cupping in Your hands.