Hope

"Hope is the feeling you have that the feeling you have isn't permanent." -

 Jean Kerr, Finishing Touches (Act III)

It's spring, and everything around me seems to be in bloom.

Trees, flowers, shrubs...

Sometimes their brightness is almost as blinding as natural sunlight on a day with no clouds in the sky.

It's an amazing sight to behold.

But today has been one of those days where I just. 

Couldn't. 

See it.

Because today I feel as brittle as a piece of dried-out grass in a nondescript Phoenix neighborhood in the middle of the summer time.

One wrong touch, one wrong movement, and I'm going to shatter into a million pieces.

Kind of like the days after that one at the beach in Brisbane, Australia (the one where I scared even myself with thoughts of walking into the water, and letting myself get pulled away by the currents of the Tasman Sea) nearly four and a half years ago.

I'm talking about the days in Northern Territory afterwards, where I melted down into buckets of tears on a weekly basis for no seemingly good reason other than years of repressing them coming back bite me in the ass.

Yeah, and working to get to the root of why I might want to walk into the Tasman Sea and never walk out again.

Can't forget that part.

Back then, it felt like a giant water balloon filling up inside of my chest, weighing me down and making it nearly impossible to breathe.

A lifetime of the things I needed to say, to purge, to get out of my system.

But the water balloon had to deflate, so the tears had to come first.

Then I could speak.

Right now, it doesn't feel any different - the giant water balloon filling up inside my chest, over three years worth of secret pains and poison I need purged from my system.

And I'm clinging to the promises of the red and black letters in a battered maroon covered Bible I've highlighted and marked up since shortly after I graduated from high school.

The promises in that book, and the evidence built up over a lifetime of stumbles and falls, that there is still joy to be had as long as I don't give up.

What I know from that book is this brittle, broken feeling won't last forever.

Someday, the words will come, and I will be able to name all these things that have taken up residence inside of me, and need to be evicted.

In the meantime, I aim to put my ear to His chest and listen as He whispers, "This feeling isn't permanent," again and again and again until the knowledge seeps back into my soul.

I aim to let my fists beat again His chest, and the tears soak in.

I aim to stay right where He is, because He is the only hope I have of ever seeing anything set to right.