The deeper I went into myself,
the deeper I found layers of dark, rotting hurt, anger, angst, and mistrust. I
realized that for consuming hurt and anger there had to be consuming love.
Consuming. In the past I had tried to receive God’s love, and it just didn’t
seem to be enough, but studying emotional healing and God’s grace showed the
depth of God’s love. He hurt for me. He hurt for all of us when he died for us
and came back. His love was so consuming that he keeps our tears in a jar. I
pictured jars and jars of my tears on shelves in heaven, that God would never
forget me no matter where I was or how deep my pain. He is always there. He
keeps a record of our tears, not because he suffers from depression or is
sadistic, but for quite the opposite reason. His compassion knows no bounds. He
is aware with us, and sad with us when we cry, when we feel worthless, when we
fail, when we feel ugly on the inside or outside, and when we reject ourselves
for our faults. God knows our self aversion and he cares that we hurt this way,
cares deeply. Who would care enough to keep a jar of our tears? To me there can
be no love more consuming. Why would one who created us want us to feel this
way about our lives, ourselves? We were not designed to feel this way, to live
this way, to be this way. This love washed over me like a fire burning away the
rotting hurt inside of me. I pictured rotting boards inside a decrepit house
being gutted out and burned with a consuming fire, and fresh new boards
with that pine scent being nailed into the structure instead, perhaps nails from the cross itself. Change did not come
in just a few months or a couple of years. This process began over two years
ago, and I have fallen back into my old patterns and attitudes towards my job,
and I have continued to bring up new layers of the hurt, like the cliché
metaphor of peeling back layers of an onion. But I pick myself back and put
myself back on the path. I come back. I fall back. I come back. I fall back. I
come back. I get up and keep going over and over and over and over and over . .
. I think this is the process. All the metaphors we get about learning lessons,
living life, and going through the process of life shows it linear. It shows us
failing every once in a while, and having a re-awakening every once in a while,
or even once in our whole lives. For me, I fall out of the patterns I would
like to live yearly, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily, hourly . . . And I get
back up and go back to the path I have chosen for myself, the path that I
found. The love and how humbled and grateful I am for that consuming love I
come back to again and again and again because I fall from them again and again
and again. To me, that IS the process, the process of our humanness, or our
flawed nature, and one that we should totally accept.
