Life is really hard to do alone. It is equally hard to love someone. It is especially hard to be caught in the crossfires of desires for both.
To love is, in its very essence, the choice to be vulnerable. How terrifying it is to filet your chest and let another peer inside, the meat of your soul raw and unfiltered. Unseasoned, unmarinated, unprepared cuts that you have not yet released into the marketplace to be perused. You vacillate between believing it is a spoiled, rotten thing and speculating that it just might be the most coveted dining experience in the world. So, you love and you leave and you get all confused about both and you scarcely notice that all of the actions you toss up in the air are manifestations of your indecisiveness to love and be loved in return. To open your heart, well that would be madness. You would be placed on the stage with a spotlight on your naked body while a crowd below ogles and whispers to themselves about what they see. You would run the risk of being pelted with tomatoes and booed into the next century. You would chance becoming the butt of the audience members’ jokes as they drive home, and the star of that ruthless critic’s review column in the next morning’s paper. Madness. To keep your heart closed, however, would be just as insane. There, in that place of sterile isolation, you would be safe from the gaze of the eyes that would gladly come through the door if they but had the key. Your ears would become so used to the painful quiet they would go deaf to the sound of the knocking on the door. Sitting in that windowless cell of safety for so long without the warmth of the sun and the refreshment from the rain would erase the memory of what it feels like to change. The recirculated air of that chamber would make airplane cabins seem like a forest of pines, and you may consider the possibility that you never once breathed at all. Lunacy. Yet you remain standing on the crossroads, wanting to know life and terrified of how to get it. “My heart,” you cry, “It is worse than all others, sicker than the rest of the lot combined. Who could handle it?” For you know the innermost cavities of your heart, those places you mask for fear of someone seeing the darkness and rejecting you outright. You feel the intimacy with those thoughts that flow from the deepest of valleys, still taste those frantic journal entries that say loudly what you bite your tongue on— “I feel the pain through the entirety of my body. indeed, the emotion flows into my wrist, into the very tips of my fingers. a heaviness on my skin. a headache baked into my very fiber. completely aimless. here but for no reason. walking, but dead.” And (considering you are a Christian) you close that door saying, “Surely a Christian should never feel such a thing. I must be defective.” That conclusion takes hold of you like new love, and you categorize it as truth. In reality, it is born from an imbalance of chemicals between the nerve cells of your brain. For others it will be a pack of cigarettes, a frequented website, a need for approval. We bar the entrance to those places, deciding to do the whole blasted thing alone, never stopping to consider that what we believe is a lie. We never toy with the idea that our belief systems are warped and skewed, and the people who ask to walk through the door just might see us differently than we see ourselves. We never wrestle with the notion that maybe that is the whole point. Chester Bennington once said in an interview, “This place right here, this skull between my ears, that is a bad neighborhood and I should not be in there alone. I can’t be in there by myself. It’s insane. It’s crazy in here. This is a bad place for me to be by myself. I don’t say nice things to myself. There’s another Chester in there that wants to take me down.” And so it goes, there are moments in our lives that we are in the shadow land where the sun dares not venture. We become convinced there is no possible way to go on, and even if there was, we would rather die than continue. Yes, there is agony. There are moments of seeming isolation, moments—as Spurgeon puts it—where, “The Lord knows, and has made me to know that I am but dust.” But if you can remember—and I pray you do—a story of a Vinedresser and His Vine… if you can let it carry you from behind those prison bars… well, you may just be free. The Vinedresser is active in His work of pruning and cultivation, and His Vine pours life into the branches. The Father shakes us free from all of our hang ups and establishes us on the only sure footing there is—that is His Christ. There, I think, lies the beauty. The act of establishing ourselves in Christ is (if we will have the simple faith to believe it) the work of the Father. It is a work that He is delighted by, a work that makes His heart sing, a work that is not thwarted by a heart that struggles to believe. If the God that establishes and enables to obey, the One who “perfects that which concerns” us has commanded us to love one another, you can trust that your fellow branches can love you as you are. It is something divine, this love. Though the partakers are painfully human, the work of loving one another is energized by God Himself. So let us delve back into our individual stories. Right here, right now. No polish or masks. Let us show each other our struggles, and never fake it. Let us see each other as we are, and know that redemption is ours because Christ has us— even if we, at this very moment, are not fully bought in, are disillusioned, stubborn, prideful, selfish, lazy. Let us tell each other how deeply we long to be strong, courageous, bold. Let us learn to love life, to enjoy the little things, to appreciate the feeling of laughter rolling deep from our core. Let us burn with passion as we look into each other’s faces and understand there are stories, hopes, realized and abandoned dreams in the world outside of our own. Let us fight for people because they are as fragile as we are, and let them flourish in their own ways, loving them for who they are instead of hating them for who they are not. Let us understand that things happen in this world simply because we are in it, and that life is still beautiful and worth the living even so. Let us learn to talk with nostalgia, but never move in with Him. And let us begin to dance with God, and really love Him. After all, what is this entire thing if not a love affair? Be thankful that in the times our hearts grow cold and harbor resentment, He never stops loving us. It is more nuanced than I can write, and I do not really understand it all that much myself, except that it is folly. His love is folly, and we have believed ourselves too sophisticated for it. Yet now, every wrinkle upon our hearts are being smoothed out, like old skin becoming radiant, and the balm is Him. It has always been Him. So here’s to all of us loving and growing together. The Great Iconoclast is drawing near, and there is room for rest inside His call. I sure hope your heart finds it. And I sure hope you know it’s okay to be as you are. God did not call us to be heroes; He called us to be His. So get gritty with Him, and get gritty with each other. It won’t be perfect, but it will be shepherded, for “the one who calls you is faithful, and He will do it” (1 Thess 5:24). And when you wander, know that the voice saying you can never go back is wrong, and that there is always a place set for you at the table. You just have to be hungry enough to accept your invitation.
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