Depression has struck a venomous blow to me today--largely it is hormonal as I change some meds hopefully for the better, but to some extent it involves an identity crisis finally coming to a head.
When I was young, sharp-witted, driven, focused, enthusiastic, and goal-oriented, there were certain people I hardly tossed a passing glance. People I'd roll my eyes at as I zoomed by them, my to-do list flapping in my self-generated breeze.
They were the woebegone. The chronically ill with a smorgasbord of symptoms. The whiners. The excuse-makers. The wallflowers, and not because they couldn't find a dance partner, but because they really just wanted to stand and mumble into the wall.
But God, with His ironic sense of humor and His ruggedly chastening hand, has permitted me over these last 5 or 6 years to become one of their number.
She who would not touch a leper has leprosy.
I've joined their ranks. While I don't have people treating me with the same lack of grace and dignity I once afforded the chronically weak and puny; I make up for it by mercilessly canceling their compassion. I heap disgust on myself like a self-flagellating monk lays stripes on his own back!
God teaches some people compassion by putting someone in their path who requires patience and compassion--like a special needs child or a senility-drifting, aging parent. I had steeled myself for the likes of such, should God ever lay such a demand upon the stony ground of my heart. Somewhere deep inside I knew it was stony in this respect.
I was NOT, however, prepared for that "special needs case" to be me. I was NOT prepared to have to give myself those encouraging words again and again and again, to repeat the grace and mercy and patience and comfort day in day out--toward myself. For others, fine. I'd work it up. For myself, it's get out the whip, beat the body into action, you lazy lout!
Nope, I was NOT prepared to stop rolling my eyes and look on the woebegone with pity when it involved using a mirror. You can take breaks, vacations from people who bring you down. You can't take a vacation from yourself. You're with you all the time! So I was thinking I might suffocate with this new knowledge.
Read the book.
Are you kidding!?! The book seems to be one of the triggers in all this bleakness.
Read the book anyway.
I'm reading the book...
June 14, 2003
I read something worth meditation and reflection. " 'Ask God for the Holy Spirit on the word of Jesus Christ.'(Luke 10:13) The Holy Spirit is the one who makes real in you all that Jesus did for you." (My Utmost for His Highest, p. 161.)
Chambers speaks of asking God for spiritual things out of poverty--blessed are the poor in spirit, as the Beatitudes say. If we ask out of lust, we're still seeing some desirable end; if we ask out of poverty we're just desiring escape from desperation. But many of us won't do this.
I had the thought occur to me, that old cliche-quote, "Living lives of quiet desperation." Lately, I haven't lived in quiet desperation. I've lived very vocal, loud desperation. You know, God! But I can relate to the idea of not being willing to ask out of abject poverty. Sometimes, it is easier to skip asking out of deep need, because then you don't have to deal with the bitterness of not receiving.
If I'm honest, I'll admit there have been times when I've felt I asked out of desperation, out of poverty, only to be ignored and left to sort out the dregs of bitterness on my own. Does this mean I never really hit "pauper" status? Did the bitterness mean I thought I "deserved" better? Maybe my feeling that You don't care enough to make a difference shows I'm not a total pauper yet. I can still turn away. I make the potential of Your care and concern serve as a measure of whether I'm willing to beg. If You disdain me, I'll turn away. A true beggar would hang on Your robe, even if you were to drag me along as You continued to walk away from me, I'd cling anyway.
Help me to be like the woman who would beg crumbs under the table even after You basically called her a dog.
Bless me, O God.
Youth wait impatiently for sunset.
The aged rise early and await the dawn.
But I stand with the noon day sun beating on my head;
wondering which way I turn
for relief.
I wrote this post and this poem long ago, but it speaks to me again now. No wonder You told me to go to it and read. It very much fits my need today. Again with the measuring stick; and I see what I have learned in the harder, narrower passes of life. I no longer stand in that noonday sun of life, and while I'm not exactly old, I do know what it is to wake hours before dawn, tired but too sore to sleep any longer so I rise and await the day with a cup of joe, a cat on my lap, and a Bible.
I think I'm watching last vestigial limbs of pride wither away and fall off. If leprosy it is, then it is a leprosy that takes away things that should be gone anyway.
Now I am the lost lamb, lying in the ditch--wishing but not presuming You'd actually leave the 99 to come find me.
Now I'm ready for crumbs.
What does it say again about the poor in spirit?
Oh yes...theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Those are pretty good crumbs, God.
Pretty good crumbs.
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