Sometimes there is no relief. Sometimes, the crushing is so intense that there is nowhere to go to escape it. There is no one left to ask for help. There is no motivation to do anything. There seems to be no solution, and hopelessness takes over. Thoughts of being everyone’s burden takes over, and you know they are at their wits’ end helping you. But you don’t know how to help yourself or what to do, so you just sit. Frozen.
You want to believe that there is an answer. Some great idea or opportunity is going to land in your lap. God will nudge, direct, and guide you, but there is only silence and the knowledge that you are on your own. There is no knight in shining armor, no sense of comfort, and nothing to look forward to, and you can’t seem to make yourself stand up. Breathe. Do the things you know you need to. Do the things that everyone is expecting you to do.
My faith is faltering. It is not that Jesus doesn’t exist but that He doesn’t exist for me. The Holy Spirit seems mute, and God appears to be busy with everything else. I’m not sure what I am waiting on. For.
Everything I have tried hasn’t worked. I dodge the holes I have dug in attempts to find solutions, any solution, and it’s exhausting and fruitless.
My value in myself is depleting at an alarming rate. My breathing is shallow, and I am starting to plan my escape and thinking through the impact on the people it will touch, and today, I find no reason not to. It’s not my heart that hurts. This isn’t heartbreak; this is an abandonment by the one thing I have held onto for my whole life. An unrelenting hope that there was more, that I was more. That there would be more. Except year after year, there is less, and there is never more. Any more has come at a cost to me, and that debt is here to be paid and endured, and today, the price is too great.
My options, which once seemed unlimited, now seem scarce, gone, non-existent.
I am alone. I have no solution, no grand idea. Today, I have to choose between empty comfort and enduring another day alone, and in this moment, I don’t care. Neither one appeals. Both bring pain. Either offer nothing—just more loneliness and the emptying of a dry tank.
These last few years, each one seems worse than the year before. I had so much faith. I thought that I could do it on my own. I preached the Power of Relinquishment when I only relinquished myself. The pouring of myself into a sieve has left me crumbling on the floor. Broke, broken, and hopeless.
Do I have enough left? A mustard seed? Or do I just have me, myself and I?
My prayer becomes: I don’t get it, I don’t understand. I love you; I need you.
Without answers. Without relief.
And in Psalm 22:1-2, David cried, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Why are you so far from saving me, so far from my cries of anguish? My God, I cry out by day, but you do not answer, by night, but I find no rest.”
