The Great Sadness

There is no set pace, no heartbeat, no rhythm. Every act is a gasp for air. No movement comes easy except for the one that shrugs its shoulders and lays back down in bed, closing its eyes to the world.

There is a great sadness inside of me. It weighs heavily on my chest and robs my appetite. It lives in whispers, ending a loud day with the quiet reminder I started out with nothing and ended up with less. That’s why you don’t see or hear it. Like sharing secrets, its voice is only loud enough for me to hear and wonder.

“There is grace between the dark and the dawn.”

“There is a road between lost and found.”

“Darkness does not always imply an end to the light.”

“If I came from something, then I am coming into something.

“It is good to be between a ruined house of bondage and a holy promised land.”

Are these hopeful tales of another side truth? Or just things I convince myself of to get through the day? They sound like the making of a good story, but stories have their twists and turns and unagreeable endings.

The majority of my daily life terrifies me. I think I’ve done the things that terrify me for so long it appears to the outside eye as if I were made for them. Truthfully, I live in a constant state of fragility and have named it bravery. I am brave. But the overcoming of fears does not mean an obliteration of their existence. The only way to be brave is to first be afraid. So a daily choice of bravery requires a daily acknowledgement of how completely and utterly terrified I am.

For a few years now I’ve faced each sunrise completely unsure if I have enough to make it to its set, yet I always arrive in one piece just in time to be unsure if I can do the same tomorrow. It’s why I have such a hard time laying myself down to sleep - the sooner I sleep the sooner tomorrow will come and I’m not so sure I can win again. It’s why I say I operate out of mercy - not because I’m holy, I just fail to be brave and believe before I even open my eyes, so mercy is the only option I wake up with.

Thorns, weeds, and uneven ground – things found on roads left untended to for a lack of bravery. 'Take the path that believes the best and chooses to honor others!' How many times do I follow this path into loss before I’m allowed to wander elsewhere? Sometimes the pleasure of knowing you’ve been brave hardly seems like enough.

I believe this road ends somewhere good, but I am not yet there to say so with unshakeable confidence. Still, I think it’s important to speak now, while I’m in it - another act that terrifies me, I mean of bravery. I, like most, I assume, would rather wait till this time of sadness has passed so we can look back on it together as an almost unbearable and, fingers crossed, unrepeatable season, but ‘wow look at all those flowers it grew and wasn’t it worth it??’ I am not here to admire the flowers. I am here to discuss how ruthless these thorns have proven to be. This ground is hard, cracked, dry, and lacking – not an uncommon view. The shock only comes when I realize I stand in the contents of myself. This is me. I am the one broken and sad. Not for you. Not for the world. For me.

I’m not sitting in my room with the door locked, hiding under my covers. I’m out in the world doing what I’ve always done every day. The joy you see in me is not faked. I love to laugh and be goofy and help people feel welcomed and important. Those things haven’t changed. It’s just underneath, in the pit of emotions I would prefer to avoid, is a very sad version of myself – beat down, exhausted, and wondering if she put on the right pair of shoes. I still encourage others in their sadness and teach the very things I’m learning, because truth is truth regardless of whether or not I’ve arrived in its fullness. I don’t have to stop doing or saying the things I believe just because I am also sad. It is possible and permitted to do/be in both. It’s not hypocritical. It’s actively pursuing truth while acknowledging I’m just not there yet.

Still, I fear announcing my sadness without being passed it because if I were to tell you my story as if today were my last, I’m afraid these pages would be threaded together by loss – the thickest briar in my path. But today is not my last, and I’d be hard pressed to believe the book is closing anytime soon. This is just where I’ve been walking for a while.

I don’t think there is any escaping the darker moments drawn into lifetime stories. Without them, our life's work would be absent of depth. We cannot know the size, the beauty, nor the intricacy of an object if we do not allow for darker shades of a lighter color. Likewise, we cannot fully live if we do not grant ourselves permission to walk through these darker days. Scary, I know. But I’d rather walk fearfully into freedom instead of safely into, well, nothing.

And that’s where I land every night and every morning as I stand in full awareness of what I do not have. There is a promise of something more calling my name from somewhere in the distance. There is something that has filled me moment by moment to allow me one sunset and then another. There is something worth everything I must trade in to find.

So I walk, one act of bravery after the next.

“O Lord, deepen my wounds into wisdom, shape my weakness into compassion, gentle my envy into enjoyment, my fear into trust, my guilt into honesty. O God, gather me to be with you as you are with me." - Gather Me Now, Ted Loder