Despair and depression are the rock and rope that often threaten to sink hearts into the depths of hopeless. Walking through the darkness of our own heart, or the darkness imposed by others is inevitable in a fractured world. The challenge is to enter into the storm; to take painful step by painful step through the bitter winds of whatever your nightmare is titled: deceit, betrayal, rejection, abandonment, consequence, miscarriage, cancer, divorce, death, or fill in the blank. The challenge is to learn to walk through the ominous paths with the knowledge that the Lord has each moment in His hands, and each moment is designed to weaken our mental death grip on the temporal, and strengthen our faith in the knowledge that everything goes beyond the here and now (2 Corinthians 4:17).
I'm slowly learning to not despise the difficulty of hard living, because the Lord is teaching me to rest in His promises. He's filling me with the knowledge that his love is overflowing in joy and in sorrow; in difficulty and in disease; in clarity and in confusion. When the weight seems unbearable there is solace knowing that He is constantly renewing me day by day. The heaviness is real; the pain is real; the struggle is real; and his love is real: "Consider him who endured from sinners such hostility against himself, so that you may not grow weary or fainthearted" (Hebrews 12:3). His love is the kind of love I ultimately hope to display. The knock down, drag out, suffer, struggle, and fight kind of love. I'm not talking the knight in shining armor culture love, but I'm talking the lay down your selfishness and woman up kind of love. Oh you mean, it's not all about me? There's not someone out there who is going to fill all my lonely? No "the one" to meet my every selfish notion? No prince to erase all the nightmares and paint a pretty portrait of me being whisked away when things get ugly? No, because the truth is, real love involves letting go of self and grabbing hold of sacrifice.
How does that translate into daily living? Well, there's this reality that my self-focused, fear, and anxiety driven heart can often slam me against the wall of consequence, or wreak horizontal havoc on those around me. The temptation is to remain in the shame and guilt of past mistakes or to throw up my hands in despair, but my hope must remain firm in the fact that He is relentlessly pursuing my whole heart, and the ugliness within is slowly being chipped away. His goal isn't to ambush, or trap, but to set me free from heart entanglements that threaten to destroy. He is changing the old me day by day. He presses where I need cleansing the most, and he meets me in the midst of the painful process. All the while he urges me to not grow weary, for the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it (Hebrews 12:11)... not an easy lesson. Yet, it's a beautiful lesson with a sweet spoken promise:
"Arise, my love, my beautiful one,
and come away
for behold, the winter is past;
the rain is over and gone."'
Song of Solomon 2:10-11
