rest

The past couple weeks have undone me, I think. I really haven't been able to sleep well, despite being exhausted for most of the day. I think I need a deeper kind of rest. I think that I have absorbed a deep blow, and am feeling it deeper than even I realized. I do not feel at peace with myself. I feel a need.

I feel a strange sort of hurt, the kind that makes you run home. I feel an injury that follows me in blood as I  go. The kind of hurt a human can't comfort. I feel as though my equilibrium has been knocked off balance, and I don't know quite exactly how to walk upright now, but I must try- must walk on, because the world demands that I go on like nothing is the matter with me.

How desperately I hate to be found in the wrong. I hate to make mistakes. I hate to do anything wrong. I know I'm human, I know that I'm not perfect- that no one is, but I still hate to feel in trouble. I think that somehow, when I find myself in that situation, I look up with innocence at my accusers, feeling that I am innocent- that there has to be a mistake somehow. And I think about this feeling that exists so deeply within me, and I realize that one day when I have to answer for myself, I will feel much the same way as this- guilty but having the conviction that I am innocent- having the need for God to do what He did for me. Long before I ever knew I needed it, He did it.

I am tired. Within. Tonight I feel the way that the world is not enough, that my life is not enough for me. I know it will never be. I won't ever be content for long, for more than a moment or two at a time- because it isn't enough to make me feel fixed, whole, at peace. As wonderful and crazy and beautiful as it all is, the creation isn't what I need. And it wears me down. I need something not broken. I need something not imperfect. Nothing else will make me feel any better. Nothing else will give me the rest I need, the peace I am seeking. I make my life out to be about so many other things than what it really is- I make myself out to be someone I really am not. All this trying and trying and trying to be...what a waste. How foolish to make myself pretend that I am comforted by things, by possessions, by the idea that I am somebody. I feel sick with all these things instead, and worried about things that I shouldn't be worried about. I have more than I need, and I am lucky- blessed- privileged just to be alive to know more and more that God is not disappointed in me- that God did not make a mistake in creating exactly me- that Jesus is the center of everything, and that I matter to Him.

Sometimes I feel like life here on earth is some game that I am forced to play. I am forced to go about bound by gravity with a soul full of unfillable holes. I am forced to go around breathing and beating, stepping forward and running, falling down and getting up; playing by the rules of government, money, and the psychology of our fallen nature. Sometimes I feel like I am sitting at a table, forced to play whatever hand was dealt to me- as equally involved in the turns as I am uninvolved and separate from them. I watch the world revolve on its axis of physics, as the turn changes hands because it has to, not because we want it to. Some would pass, if they could, but no, the game forces us to go with whatever best we can do, and disciplines us when we cheat. And the more I play the more I realize there will never be a winner. There is only the next turn, and only an end to the game when our time has run out.

I hate this. I hate feeling like that I have to go along with this strange game, when I would much rather be free from it. I would much rather quit this table and talk to my Father about it. The game makes me hunger to no longer play it- makes me long to engage in whatever "real" life is- the life outside of the game I know so well. One day I will know. And on that day, though I will be guilty of cheating my table-mates, of slandering them, of wishing them ill, I will look up and find that I am yet innocent, forgiven, accepted, loved beyond the confines of death. Because of Jesus, I can approach God. Because of Jesus, I can play the game knowing that one day it will end, and when it does, I can lay down my cards exactly where they were given to me, stand up, and go outside to walk in the garden with my gracious God, knowing that I am living for the first real time. And I will finally know the kind of rest I find myself seeking at this hour.