Rednecks and Fountain Pens

You've got that God aimed anger, and I get it, I do. He didn't rescue you, and your heart and mind say no good God would allow what happened to you. I've heard some say that our brutal journeys are for down the road when it's no longer our turn to be tortured, but to support and to guide. But then my thinkers think "why for?" when God could have prevented it, stopped it, or created a painless world? The insubstantial responses I have are wholly unsatisfactory. I do not understand God's ways, and I'm a poor representative. Attempting to answer the whys, for me, doesn't work. It lets the bitter linger and the resentment dwell. God talks to me in fully formed thoughts, sometimes. The justice doesn't lie in what we've been through, or what He allows. The justice is that He's always there, and He would never put upon us any dreadful thing He has not already volunteered to endure Himself. Sometimes these days the pain feels impossible to bear for one more second. It's hollow, and endless as it fills my whole being. It's so powerful a wail it surpasses sound. It's the vocal version of dreaming you can't land the punch, impotent pats of the fist are all you can execute. They don't match the fury building inside. Those are the worst dreams, and perfectly illustrate just how helpless I feel. My wailing doesn't fall on deaf ears, it doesn't fall at all, it doesn't even take flight. My heart feels shattered even as it feels swollen and leak proof. The pressure fills my whole chest. It lessens a little by the time the sobbing stops, and I don't know where that release goes, but there is enough gone to breathe before growing more.

Once I let go of the anger, many years ago, that's when I found solace in God. It took much longer to know Him though. There's never enough of knowing Him, it's an endless sojourn. But I know Him well enough to comfort me. And this is what He told me: "I AM, and I KNOW". In dark moments of wanting to be seen and understood, He is there. He knows us, Never again will you have to wish someone understands you once you seek Him. I have a love/hate relationship with simple, true statements. Nothing else matters beyond "God loves you", and elaborations can weaken the message, but my relationship with God can't fit on a bumper sticker. I learned things about God, and myself on meandering backroads of my mind. I felt Him there, almost imperceptible, easy to miss or overlook at times. It is impossible for my mind to understand how God could be everywhere at once. I only understand He is with me, and in talking with others, they know the same. For those that look for Him, all can attest, He is there, inescapably so. I am a mother. A child inaccessible to a parent hurts, but a complete physical loss, an unending one, is an unbearable thought. I cannot imagine being Mary, raising God, as a son. It doesn't not align itself with my understandings, but I can begin to imagine the pain of loss, and more, to helplessly witness the torture of one that inhabits your heart, who carries your fragility with them out into the world. The images we see of Jesus hung on the cross, hands and feet nailed, a band of thorns on His brow, and a cloth covering His loins, give a false impression. Current depictions would be enough, ARE enough to catch in my throat when I see His sacrifice. BUT, these images have been made palatable, a sanitized version of a sacrifice we could never begin to earn or imagine. The loin cloth wasn't necessary because there was nothing discernable left to cover. It is my oversensitivity to clothes that evokes the beginnings of comprehension. With a flail I am forced to fling a sweatshirt, a many hour long companion of the day, with sudden desperation, off my body. Maybe it's a seam, or tag, or the collar pulls ever so slightly off to one side, and my mind is now obsessed with the offense. It's insignificant and superficial, but that's what brings into clarity the extraordinary suffering of carrying a cross with no flesh to pad the bones, no layer of skin to cover the nerves, just barely enough tissue left to keep the skeleton intact. The message of Christianity is not comforting. This is what is meant when it is said to pick up and carry your cross. Wrench it from the ground with half gone musculature, rest it on raw scapula and heave yourself forward. There is no way out of this torture. You'll be beaten worse if you falter, or fall, and regardless, you'll suffer, and then die. You'll suffer and die while being mocked. Dying for the possibility of those who mock, and hate you to be redeemed and transformed, with no guarantee your sacrifice will be noticed, appreciated, or accepted. It is pure love, even for those who attempt to destroy you. That's why God instructs us to forgive, and love our neighbors. We will never be worthy of his sacrifice, but God loves and forgives us anyway, so we must pay it forward, as they say these days. Forgiveness is one of our sacrifices that he commands we make; an intentional, chosen, worldly death in this unholy realm. That "He loves you, and died for you" doesn't resonate with my being, it is in my imagination where I find awe. I used to watch autopsy media, considered becoming a mortician even, until I was growing a human in me. Then, I could feel the damage to bodies similar to feeling my own injuries. Mirror synthesia it's called. Maybe all moms have the emotional version. Helplessly she watched the torture and murder of her son. God felt that, He knows her pain, and all her anguish, personally. For His disciples too, and the horror they all felt, the heavy burden of the truth that they were watching their friend, and their God die before them. All that pain of those who loved him, and yet still superficial by comparison, by his eternal self-sacrifice. God adorned with human flesh feels all, knows all, knows what's in the hearts of the ones murdering him, and of those cheering them on. He loves them anyway. While God's human body was being destroyed, all the physical pain, the pain of betrayal, the grief that comes with being hated by your own creation for whom you have eternal love regardless, He continued on with his own sacrifice. As He is dying, He's also the father watching his son endure the most brutal act in all of history. He could stop it. He could stop it as the father, and as the Son. He didn't. Instead He watched, and wept. That's how much He loves you. The whole of the universe was created by Him, and still He sees you. YOU matter to the greatest Power, the Creator, Life Bringer of the universe. He never abandoned you. He knows your pain. My human mind says bad things shouldn't be allowed to happen, especially to children. I can't give you reasons why He allows what He does. All I know is that He didn't just allow, He orchestrated for Himself the most painful of all conceivable deaths, for me, and for you because He truly loves each of us. You may feel alone, and unloved, even unlovable, but that's the pain of our broken human world, not of God. He loves you completely, regardless of how others treat you. You've been abandoned by flesh, but never by God, you just don't allow His unconditional love to wash over you, and fill you. Knowing God requires surrender, and submission, and invitation. I started to know God before my surrender, and submission were practiced, but without, one can only go so far. He needed that from me, and I needed reason to give it. That's how He works, He plants seeds as you grow with Him, He works as best He can within the confines of your understanding. As you get closer He'll remind you not to lean on your own understanding, but He doesn't ask of you what you don't know exists, sins you aren't yet aware are sinning. Lean into Him, trust Him, and then He will give you reasons to lean in more. He'll love you until you don't want what He doesn't sanction. He'll love you so hard nothing else compares, or rather, He already loves you like that, you have just been blind to it.