LET YOUR HEART LIVE
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November 3
listen. listen. listen.
i am not your enemy.
i am not your destruction.
i am not your punishment.
listen. listen. listen.
hear my agony.
hear my longing.
hear my need.
listen. listen. listen.
grant me grace.
grant me compassion.
grant me love.
I have cried an ocean of tears.
Sometimes I think they will never stop.
But they always do.
There are moments when I think I’ve taken all that I can, when I think one more step might actually break me.
But I’m always granted the strength to get back up and keep going.
I have to work on remembering all that I’ve read and seen and experienced.
I can’t let any of it slip through the cracks.
I absolutely cannot allow all this pain to have been for nothing.
And yet there’s something I need that I don’t know if I will ever get.
I am almost certain not to get it from any of my relatives.
Because it isn’t easy or pleasant.
It requires the utmost humility and extreme courage.
People talk about challenging themselves to their limits but I’ve never known anyone willing to take up this challenge.
It’s utterly terrifying and it tests us to the limits of our love and resolve.
But I need it so, so badly.
I need someone to feel the pain they’ve caused me.
Not the pain of their own guilt and failure.
The sorrow and anguish and grief that threatens to consume me every day.
I don’t want anyone to apologize just to make themselves feel better and ease their own conscience and emotions.
I don’t want them to confess because they feel bad that they failed.
I want them to feel what I feel.
I understand why people think revenge is the only way to ease their pain.
They think that forcing the perpetrator to suffer means that they will feel some measure of the agony of their victim.
Except it doesn’t work that way.
Human beings have developed an exceptional capacity to deceive themselves and harden their hearts to the truth.
We are so adept at not feeling what we actually feel that someone else trying to force us to feel anything is entirely futile.
I can’t help really wanting it, though.
And I don’t have a clue what to do about that.
God, if You’re there, please help me.
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It’s been over a year since I wrote those words.
I started my own journals after I finished Granny’s partly because it made me feel closer to her and partly because I had so many thoughts in my head after reading what she wrote that I thought my brain might actually explode if I didn’t express them somehow.
It would be an understatement of massive proportion to say that I was reluctant to fully embrace everything Granny believed. Not just about God. About herself and the rest of her family, too. Because that meant staring some pretty harsh reality in the face and saying, “Yep.”
But I put my feet on that path and even though I’ve often wanted to run screaming into the hills or sit down and refuse to keep going, I’m still here.
I’m still asking God what His deal is. I’m still searching for that Life Granny wrote about. I’m still knocking on the same doors she did.
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December 24
There’s a scene at the end of one of my favorite movies where a character who’s been in prison pretty much his whole life laments that he lives in constant fear once he’s paroled and lives on the outside.
He says he can’t stop thinking about ways to violate his parole so they’ll put him back in prison.
Where things make sense.
Now, he wasn’t in a minimum security cakewalk of a prison.
It was disgustingly horrendous and yet, he longed to be back there because life and freedom were too overwhelming for him.
I’m willing to bet there’s not a single person who’s ever worked at processing and navigating through Complex-PTSD who hasn’t felt the exact same way.
Because that’s what chronic abuse and assault do to you.
Not only are you imprisoned in your own mind and body, you come to believe such a state of existence is the only thing that makes sense.
True life and health are terrifyingly chaotic and unpredictable and uncertain.
Better to remain unhealthy and imprisoned.
At least that’s familiar territory.
But as Granny once wrote, if becoming a true human being, if finding true Life and health was easy, all the kids would be doing it.
However, unlike what so many movies and TV shows try to tell you, revelation and realization DO NOT equal healing.
You do not instantly become a different person in one moment of insight.
Not even in a thousand such moments.
It is not revelation, realization, or insight which heals.
Healing is the result of sometimes excruciating and agonizing hard work.
Demolishing and utterly destroying any and all strongholds, as Granny put it.
Practicing truth in myriad ways.
Discovering your true self — the self you were made to be — through a whole, whole, whole lot of asking, seeking, and knocking, a whole, whole, whole lot of trial and error.
Slipping and sliding and sometimes tumbling head over heels down the side of Sand Mountain.
But you either choose Life and health or you choose dying death.
There is no in between.
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I think Granny understood that better than anyone I’ve ever known.
And now…so do I.