I’ve been sitting here, trying to get the words unto paper that keep running through my mind.
It’s been difficult lately, difficult to get any words out. My mind seems so numb.
I sit here, and I passively listen to teaching, passively listen to the reading of the Word. I passively listen to a worship session online which encourages to worship along, yet I can’t bring my mouth to open and sing any songs of praise right now.
I wish I could.
I want my heart to do so.
But I can’t bring it to sing these words. I can’t bring myself to sing.
I cry out to God for Him to change this. Change my heart. To make it sing.
For Him to give me the words back, those words that I sang with all my soul only a few short weeks ago.
I don’t know how I got here. How I ended up in this place of really struggeling to believe any of what I hear or read or sing.
I wish I would be somewhere else. Back in the place where I came from, where I knew the sweetness of redemption and healing, and sung melodies of joy to the Lord from a full and grateful heart.
And yet I’m not there anymore. And they say we should never go back.
Instead, I am here now: at a place that I can’t believe I’m back in, in the rut of brokenness, darkness, numbness. A place that leaves me so empty that it feels like there’s nothing I could ever give again. A place that leaves struggeling to keep up with the everyday of life, and to keep up with it well. A place that leaves me wondering if any of those words and songs are really true.
In my head, I know they are.
My heart wants to believe they are.
But it doesn’t actually believe they are.
It’s the dichotomy of my soul: the wanting to believe something, the somehow believing, but actually, in reality, not really believing.
I’m trying to force myself, but no one can ever be forced to believe something.
That’s the beauty of faith: no one can ever force you to believe anything.
But it’s also the challenge of faith: for no matter how much you want to believe, you won’t ever be able to force yourself.
That’s the beauty of faith: no one can ever force you to believe anything. But it’s also the challenge of faith: for no matter how much you want to believe, you won’t ever be able to force yourself.
– Martha
When you’re wandering in that wilderness of believing and not believing, you’re not able to just get up and leave. It’s a long journey through a wide, large, deserted plain that you can’t just get through in one day.
It’s a journey through a wilderness that leaves you having to live through it, day after day, bearing the emptiness and dryness and barrenness, bearing the wasteland, until one day, you will have made it through. Or at least, you might find an oasis.
It takes strength to be able to endure that wilderness. To bear the dichotomy of your soul.
And in all my lack of faith, I pray to a God that I know is out there somewhere, that He will give me the strength to bear this.
That He will let me hold on until I have find my way through, until my soul will have found the way back to security in faith, to joy in salvation, to certainty that I am a child of the one and only Father, the good God.
Until I will have found my oasis. And hopefully, I won’t wander away far enough to not find my way back.
