A Severely Merciful Week

This week has had a wide range of emotion and experience; probably some of my lowest lows and some of the most impacting reliefs.
It is so hard to trust the Father when I don't know what He's doing. I think that Dante's idea of "Limbo" being the most appropriate place in Hell for the unbelieving philosopher is very insightful. I'm no philosopher, but for me, aimless wandering is torture.

I may ask for the Lord's will, but I don't really mean it. Perhaps, at best, I do actually mean it, but something else within me won't free me to surrender to it.

In The Great Divorce, C.S. Lewis describes Hell as being too small to contain even the smallest part of Heaven. He says, through the voice of George MacDonald, that Hell is a state of mind, whereas Heaven is reality. There's something about that description that rings very true to me; my own mind quite literally is Hell. This week I felt as if the skyline of my perspective was so small, so near to me that if I closed my eyes, I felt that I could actually reach out and touch it. I became so claustrophobic within myself, I thought I would die.

I kept thinking about the Marie Barnett song "This Is The Air I Breathe"; I really needed some spiritual oxygen this week.

What's strange but hardly ironic is that, in all of my "woe-is-me-ness", God still relieved my anxiety. I've heard so many say that "God waits on us", but I can't say that of this week. If by that they mean that He doesn't go on ahead without them, then I couldn't agree more, but it can sound as if He's twiddling His thumbs (if God actually has thumbs), waiting for me to decide to trust Him. That decision was not a luxury I had. It's like trying to decide when to breathe: as much as one can try to regulate it, it still remains need based.

In all of my floundering of "where is my life going?", He's showing me where to go, one day at a time.

I am thankful for this week and the opportunity to see, as the saying goes, "I know not what the future holds, but I know Who holds the future."

I suppose "not all who wander are lost."