When Everything Feels Dead

There will be some days, beloved, when everything in you feels dead.

You won’t want to eat. You won’t want to sleep. You’ll feel scared and alone, like you just lost your best friend, your most priceless treasure. All the world will feel dark and you’ll want to give up. You’ll want to sit in a corner and cry for days, for weeks perhaps...trying to cry out all the sadness and pain.

You’ll feel frantic at times, anxiously scrambling about for anything firm to cling on to. You’ll feel despondent at other times, snot dripping and loud wailing, not able to care about anything or anyone, only lost in your own sense of despair, like a drowning person taking water into the lungs, unable to save yourself.

You’ll want to die. You’ll think about the train and how fast it goes, how close it is. You’ll think about bridges and medicines and cars and viruses. You’ll think about the lady in the novel you read in high school, how she swam out into the ocean one morning with the sunrise and never swam home again. You’ll curl up into a ball on the cold floor of a dark room, praying for Him to destroy you in His wrath and anger, for it’s what you deserve, what you feel like you want. 

You’ll beg Him to take you Home, and you’ll feel angry that He hasn’t with each breath you take. You’ll tell Him you’re finished, that it’s too hard here, that even opening your eyes feels impossible. You’ll feel weaker and more hopeless than you ever have in your entire life.

And then.

Just when you’re ready to run away, he will come.

He will stoop down beside you and draw you up. He will wipe your tears away, even as more fall. He will be tender with you and reassure you. He will forgive you.

He will cut your food into small bites and feed you. He will bring you cool water for your parched mouth. He will smile at you, gently, and hold your hand, and rub his fingers across your skin. 

He will make light in attempt to eek out a tiny smile from your lips. Every time you bow your head in shame and sadness, he will lift your chin gently, until your eyes meet his and you see his overwhelmingly beautiful Love for you flowing right on out.

He will let your weary body sag against him and he will hold you in his strong but gentle arms. His hands in your hair, he will whisper truths and sweet promises. He will adore you, even as you are falling to pieces. Even your boogers, he will gladly wipe away with his fingers and thumb, smiling gently all the while, and telling you how he delights in every part of you, always; with italics, he will say.

He will tell you that that which is most precious, we keep hidden away, like the gold coin you gave him. That our Love is like that - being stored up in Heaven, ready to be let loose on the Day when the Master returns with His key and unlocks the treasure He has been saving and safely storing up for so long.

He will remind you that nothing is lost. Nothing of real value. No, beloved. (gentle) For All Things are being made New even now. He will tell you that we are like grass, here today and gone tomorrow, that He is coming Soon. His jaw, your hip...we’re falling apart Together, he will say, joyfully.

And beloved? You will be able to rise then. Not strong yet, still so very weak, tears still just below the surface at every moment, but...rise you will. Only in part and feebly, now, but One Day, in all glory and strength and power.

Rest in this, beloved.

—-

But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which He loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive Together with Christ — by grace you have been saved — and raised us up with Him and seated us with Him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the coming ages He might show the immeasurable riches of His grace in kindness toward us in Christ Jesus.

— Ephesians 2:4-7 (ESV)