Beauty for Ashes.

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

.my obsessive search for meaning.

I have been trying so hard to find some benefit to all of this. I am storing this experience up, taking everything in. I have indeed taken seriously the phrase "that which doens't kill you makes you stronger." I've grieved like a pro. [or so you think from the outside] I have squeezed life lessons out of my dads death like I was wringing out a wet towel.

Grief is like a dear friend to me, having taught me deep valuable lessons. I have studied it, and attacked it head on. I have gotten many many comments about my strength, only reinforcing my need to look strong. I have studied as many angles of grief as one can when in the midst of it. My mental constructs are all perfectly organized with compartments and labels which I make sure to shine every once in a while for when I will need to whip out some brilliant personal experience that someone else might benefit from.

Yes, I have listened. God sure will use this in the future.

I realized this: It didn't kill me, I am stronger. God will use this for good. So what now...

I fill my life with organized technicalities so that I won't have to just give my heart to God. I have put forth so much effort to gain benefits and rewards from this experience (benefits and rewards from both the eyes of the Christian community and secular community, who's not up for some strength and goodness?). I study, I read, Job is like my best friend, I get my necessary crying in in order to have a healthy grief experience, I talk openly about it, I listen to others, but the very last thing I want to do, the very thing I work SO hard to avoid, is just crying to God. Literally. I will do anything else before that.

Because yes, I am stronger. Yes, people will and have already benfitted from this experience. These are examples of rewards that aren't what grief is about at all. We so desperately try to search for meaning in grief, and now that I've squeezed as much meaning out as I can within these limits of time, I find that it is so empty. And the only meaning that can shine through this grief experience is just Jesus. There is no answer from him but I love you. There is no answer. I don't want an answer and I never did. But I don't want to spend time with him because then my deepest darkest fear stands right before me and I have to look at it: I miss my dad, and he isn't coming home, and there is nothing I can do about it, and to its core there is nothing good about that. No further meaning. Nothing. God in his grace can make beauty out of terrible experience, but as much meaning as we try so hard to see, there is none but God.

God did not answer Job. He only promises us his presence in grief and I fear that. It is too powerful for me. I want to stick with my organization and studying to make my own meaning. I cannot face the Lord with my deepest heartwrenching ache. When I come to this realization, I learn that I have not made much of a dent in my heartache. I have only masked it with my passion for learning and the human mind. I have only masked my ache with the thought of helping someone in the future, or the thought of using this expereince to make me stronger. I have done great with that. But actually grieving, I might have put in a few hours.

I think God probably should be in charge of our story changing lives in the future. It is after all His story. I think God probably should be in charge of my strength and my well being.

I fear really letting him in because I fear the deep pain that losing my dad has caused, and I just don't want to feel it. I don't really need meaning as much as I think I did. It was just a coping mechanism. But I realized today for the first time that all my coping mechanisms have run their course and I felt so very empty. So I hope I will start to choose ACUTALLY Jesus, rather than trying to improve His kingdom on my own.

It just simply sucks. And God has been waiting patiently for me to see that all along. It's not about the meaning at all. He's not looking for that. He's just looking at my heart. He knows absolutely nothing will satisfy my desire for meaning. There is nothing He could say to make me content with my dad being gone. Nothing.

And He has never tried to give me an answer, for the first time I am starting to see that as really kind.

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