this heavy sadness

Every so often, I feel it coming. It's like this dark cloud that I can see a mile off and I know it's headed in my direction, but I have yet to figure out how to redirect it's path or destroy it altogether, so I do things like watch a movie, pinterest, watch Grey's Anatomy reruns, sew, or make Halloween decorations to busy my hands and my mind. But it doesn't stop the cloud... it just postpones it. Until I've run out of things to do.

And then, it engulfs me. I can never quite figure out what it is that has me in such a tizzy, but it is heavy and it is sad. It's like a sadness in my soul that creeps in and breeds despair. It starts with things in my life... relationships or old ones or new ones, future plans, past plans that never happened or are long gone, memories that are so sweet it hurts to think of them... people I love so much that might as well be a million miles away. And then it spreads into the world. The kids in the inner cities of America going to sleep hungry, or working street corners to provide for their siblings [and in some cases, parents]. Old people dying in nursing homes where people have completely forgotten they exist. Wives waiting up and crying themselves to sleep over the reality that their husbands are unfaithful. Homeless men gathered around a trash can warming their hands and sharing stories. Orphans all around the world with no parents to love them as individual masterpieces of God's creation. And I can't sleep and I'm not hungry and I don't want to sew or paint or write, and I don't want to even breathe because the sadness is pressing on my chest.

So I try things to make it go away... I pray and I read my Word and I beg God to take it, or show me why it's here. I think about all the people I love and I thank God for them. I cry. And I laugh. And I just sit in it and muddle. And that is where God meets me. And He tells me that this, this is what it's about. This being broken hearted for people who are suffering, even when you can't physically see them or hear their cries. This is what living is about. This is what being part of the family of Jesus Christ is about. He weeps for these people too. He weeps for me.

And  this is what is supposed to happen when I love my Lord and liken myself to His heart, I will be heartbroken for the same reasons He is. It's not meant to be something I can push away and put in a box and compartmentalize like the rest of my life. It is meant to overwhelm me and be inescapable. So I let it be, for a night. And I sit and cry until I fall asleep. And then when I wake up in the morning, it's a new day. And I'm always ready to face it head on and get my hands dirty and love until it hurts. So, thats what I do.

"...weeping may stay for the night,
but rejoicing comes in the morning."

Psalm 30:5

 

Oh yea, and this is what Delilah thinks of me trying to distract myself by reading a children's story:

not on her watch, basically.