Drifting, in stops and starts through life. Moving forward and then back. I make some progress, I gain some ground, but then so quickly I give it up, so quickly I allow life to numb me, to pull me back, to pull me away. My heart is coming alive, I think of God, I sense him, and I know, my heart is coming alive, but then deadness tempts, it desires, it allures. Deadness, with its numbness, with the temptation not to feel, to wall up, to back off, to run away, to hide. To hide from this world, from the pain, from the disillusionment and disappointment. Deadness tempts.
And I realize I have a choice, every day I get the choice. The choice to move closer to death or to life, the choice to engage or to numb. It is a hard choice because engaging means feeling the pain, the sadness, the grief, the loss; engaging means facing myself with all the disappointments, the failures, the let downs. Engaging means actually seeing me. Where numbness means I get to escape; I'm still in life, but I'm not really living. I'm just going through the motions, being where I'm required to be, following the rules, and always looking for the things that numb. Moving toward deadness means I always need something to keep me distracted, to keep me numb, to keep my eyes closed. Its this sense of desperately trying at all times to keep something in front of me, so I don't see, so I don't engage, so I don't live. Desperately trying, but its a quiet desperation, so quiet, so elusive that sometimes I don't even realize it is there. And I do it, I do it all the time, I fall into numbness, I fight for numbness, for deadness; because sometimes I don't want to live. I don't want to engage, I don't want to see, I am scared of the pain, I'm scared of me, I'm scared of what is inside, I'm scared that it's not actually enough, and so I numb instead.
But by numbing, I don't realize what I am missing. I don't realize the cost. I don't see the other side of engaging, of truly engaging; of living instead of dying. I don't see that engagement also means finding the joy of knowing deep inside that I actually am enough, of experiencing the peace and acceptance on the other side of grief; of encountering intense, pure engagement in life, of seeing nature and getting tears in my eyes because of its beauty, of dancing in reckless abandon, of feeling the ecstasy of simply being. The engaging, the living, the seeing, which I am so terrified of, is actually love, joy, and peace; the heart and soul; it is what I've been longing for. Engaging is life; it is what I'm created for. It's daring to take that deep dive into the pain and discouragement and fear that I'm not enough. It's actually allowing my heart to feel the pain, to see the pain, to live the pain, to become the pain; and to come out on the other side and to realize that the pain does not define me, to realize the pain cannot destroy me, and to realize the pain no longer holds power over me. To live, to truly live, is to embrace the pain, knowing that in it is life, in it is freedom, in it is where I find the treasure of truth that make me come alive.
Numbness, moving toward deadness, is tempting, but today; today I choose life, I choose adventure, and I choose the pain because I know that is where I truly come alive. I might be terrified of the pain, but today I am looking at the other side. Tomorrow I might forget, I might slip back into numbing, I might forget to look, but today, today I choose to embrace what makes me come alive, and in so doing, to truly experience God.
