All posts tagged good news

I’ve noticed a few things that seem to keenly affect me.  One is how I feel when I need some form of being taken care of, and the person I ask for it and/or expect it from doesn’t come through.  I realize that people can’t read my mind, so it takes me a little time to sort out my feelings in the latter case.  Either way, though, I feel frustrated and betrayed.  I do a lot of taking care of people.  I enjoy it, and it blesses me.  But everybody needs to be taken care of, at some point, even the caretakers.

Another is when I can tell I’ve disappointed somebody, let somebody down.  It’s worst, of course, when that somebody is a person I really care about or a person I want to think well of me; I feel like the world’s biggest heel. The problem with this one is that I don’t always understand that I’ve disappointed someone until they are very clear about this.  I can be good at reading people, and I can also be totally oblivious.

There’s something about the period between about 2:30 and 4:30 am.  If there were a time of day that is the desert wilderness — as opposed to the times of day that are growing fields or orchards ready for harvest — then it would fall in that range of hours.  The neighborhood is quiet.  The home is silent, holding only those little creaks and clicks and hums that the house makes.  You’re too tired to do anything, and too awake to stay in bed and sleep.  These wilderness hours, they are the time of existential crisis, the time when we are stripped bare, vulnerable to thoughts, ideas, and feelings of the worst kind. 

When I lie awake during these hours, I become aware of all the people I’ve let down ever, and I feel like a poop.  Not just any poop, but the poop of the creatures that eat poop: the lowest of the low.  And I fear that nobody is really taking care of me, not as me; everyone’s just doing their own thing, and when it happens to help me, well, then good for me.  Or maybe I come to the stunning realization that they only take care of me because they feel sorry for me, this worthless poop.  I begin to wonder if I’m wrong about everything and everybody.  Is love actually real?  Is it only really self-interest after all?  And if love mightn’t be real, then family doesn’t matter and friendship doesn’t matter, and we’re all just terribly and terrifyingly alone.  And worst of all, if all of this is true, then what does it say about God?  Is God real, or have we just made God up?  Is everything just hopeless and pointless, and then we disappear into oblivion?

Wilderness sucks.  There’s no other way to say it.  When we’re in the times or places or life-situations of desert wilderness, it just sucks.  Thankfully, God’s been pretty handy with the Great Cosmic Two-by-Four (aka, “Clue-by-Four”), with which God can whack me upside the head when I start circling the drain with these thoughts.  It doesn’t always take a whack upside the head; sometimes it’s more of a poke with the Little Cosmic Twig or even a whisper from the Cosmic Rustling Leaves.

And that’s the Good News: even in the driest desert, in the darkest night, the furthest reaches of the wilderness, God is there.  Nothing can separate us from God’s love. Not us, not any other person, not any substance, not any accident of birth or illness or anything else, not any being that has ever been created: nothing whatsoever can separate us from God’s love.

Not even letting God down.