Stand Down

There are times in life that are suffocating.  When something hits you like a brick in the gut and all the wind is forced out your throat.  For a moment, or maybe days or weeks, you wonder.  Will I breathe again?  Will I even be able to move again?  Your husband had an affair.  Your child is found to have a drug problem.  Your father had a heart attack.  You have cancer.  Things that you did not expect and come from nowhere just come barreling into you– unwelcomed and damned pieces of truth – that cause you to just take rapid breaths in quick succession and walk around the living room in concentric circles not making any damn sense.    And you want to scream at someone, rip something up, throw something against the wall until it shatters.  Anger is the only tool at your disposal because you simply have no other emotion that matches the intensity of this thing.

I have been in this place.  A place of awakening where a veil around you that is torn, a bubble popped, a world that you worked so hard to create for yourself that is peaceful and calm is somehow ripped apart and is scattered like little shards about your feet.  A darkness streams in like something from a Harry Potter film, a wind that you cannot see, a cold that you cannot hide from.  And you wrap your hands around your arms and sit with the brick in your gut in the freezing rain and think “this is not what I had planned.  This not the world that I wanted.  This is not the life that I expected.”

I’m on the other side of that wall with my hand placed on the mortar, speaking to you.

It’s hard to figure out a pathway through sometimes.  You have to sit inside the darkness of that truth, flipping over in some hard bed or pacing the floor and thinking about how you can possibly move forward.  What is the future of this.  What is the next step from here.  How can I survive yet another thing.

In times like these, I pray.  Not an eloquent prayer of love, or some lofty-sounding plea, but a desire to simply be held.  Held like a child, how an infant needs swaddling or a baby wants to be curled up sleeping next of his mother’s bare and bonding skin.  I simply pray that I’ll make it until the morning, that the light that is invisible to me will someday be seen, that I will be able to sleep through the night and get up the next day, alive and breathing.

After all, we don’t have the luxury of breaking down.  Children depend on us, work is waiting on us, clients are calling us.  We have to get up and let the hot water practically burn our skin in the shower and we put on our suits and smiles and mascara.  We nail that speech or that project or that work to be done.  And then we fall over again after, in the hotel room of our life, just collapsing from the weight we have to carry.

But can you see it, my friends inside of this box?  The gift this carries with it that you do not realize?   The ability to carry on in such times is a powerful thing.  The power we have to compartmentalize and move forward and do the hard work that needs to be done even though our inner child is hurt and wounded is hard. This itself is a form of perseverance, and what it says in the book of James about building up endurance through hardship is true.  To know that we are hurt, but to get up and move, and to trust that God will work out all evil for his ultimate good.  To trust that God has our best interests at heart despite all the darkness, and that ultimately light will enter in – this is true power.

The other day I was filled with dread, to the point where my heart rate rose and I had to pull over to the side of the road.  An image of a friend’s daughter filled my heart. She is a former drug addict and is fresh in her recovery, and it plagued me.  I sent her daughter a message, and prayed for her safety.  I didn’t know what was happening but I felt an urge to send her some telepathic message, to intervene for her.  I prayed that God would give her strength to say to whatever evil she was facing to stand down.  And words came upon my heart so strongly.  Stand down, bad influences.  Stand down, apathy.  Stand down, little voice in her mind that said she’s a worthless ugly loser of a girl and that she wasn’t worth sobriety.  Stand the fuck down.  It continued to hold me though the grocery store, and in the aisles between the peanut butter and the paper towels.  I assumed people would think I was on bluetooth as I muttered STAND DOWN through the aisles. Over and over and over.  Maybe I was speaking to her.  Maybe I was just speaking to myself.  After about five minutes, the feeling passed.  I stopped praying and went back to buying cans of sparkling water and pondering why there’s so much flavored coffee.

But it made me think how so many people are aching.  And at times, it is I who aches. I’m no hero.  But I can say with certainty that I know, and I understand, what this feeling of helplessness feels like.  So many times in my life I have wondered how I could possibly move on.

But I did.  And I will continue to do so.  Because I believe that dark nights of the soul are part of us.  They forge us.  They burn a hole in us that will eventually heal, and we show people our scars so that they will gather strength from our suffering. And we find a way through this night to a morning where we put on our shoes and lace them up tight.  Because life can’t break us.  It can’t ruin us.  It can only push us down for a time.  We are able to get back up and keep on keeping on.  We won’t let it win, this ugly darkness.  It won’t win over us because we keep on saying, over and over into the dark night, into the wind that chills and freezes and makes our teeth chatter, to evil so dark that it scares us to our very bones,

Stand down. You are not welcome here.

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