So first. Without going into details, I've just realized my emotional issues of the past week can all be summed up by the words, 'broken heart.' This did not come to me until today, when my friend Erica used her index fingers and thumbs to make the shape of a heart and then cracked it in half like an egg. I am experiencing a broken heart. It's an entirely new sensation. I've experienced disappointment, dashed hopes, been really let down or depressed before, but this is a new level of 'down'. The (of course entirely appropriate) irony is that the object of my broken heart has no idea. That is the story of my life-- passing under others' radar because I'm too AFRAID to disturb the waters.
The heartbreak has inspired a truly interesting week for me, whence I've decided to embrace feeling low in a Week of Lament. The Bible is pretty full of both exaltation AND lament-- so it makes no sense to me why as Christians we are always focusing on the exaltation. SOMETIMES YOU JUST NEED TO LAMENT. And not feel guilty about NOT being happy, or feeling fine, or that you just want to go back to bed when you wake up in the morning. I have decided that God allowed humanity to experience both the highs and the lows-- we have the capabilities to feel great sorrow and pain as well as joy, and I find it difficult to believe that we would feel the former just to appreciate the latter. Surely feeling crummy has merit on it's own? I should throw in here that I have no biblical basis whatsoever for what I'm doing, but it somehow still makes sense to me.
In order not to become actually clinically depressed and the mopey friend no one wants to be around, I've set a cap on my season of Lament. So I'm giving myself one week to be down, to give in and tell people who carelessly ask, "How are you?" that I'm UNWELL. One week to beg out of social engagements I just can't fake my way through-- without guilt. One week to not care what I look like, to be late (within reason), and to not have to smile when I pass people on the sidewalk (though this is hard with people I know because I don't want to be RUDE). In addition to these things, I'm fasting from color. It seems doubly appropriate: color brings me great joy, it's probably the sole reason I enjoy photography and painting (neither of which I have any measurable talent). So by fasting from color (which means I am not wearing any, only black), it is a kind of symbolic gesture of my Week of Lament. Additionally, lament, which is about grief, despair, and mourning seems perfectly associated with the color black. Lamentations are songs, poems, or music expressing grief, mourning, or sorrow. I'm proficient in none of those things (songs, poems, or music), but I reason that life is itself an artistic expression not unlike poetry or music. So living is my art.
In keeping with that theme, I have finally reached a plateau in my week, when this whole mess has finally reached it's height, and after climbing the mountain blind now as I can finally see from the top, things are beginning to make a little sense. 'Experience Wrought' is a suitably appropriate title for this blog, a phrase stolen from another song by The Cobalt Season (called Help Me Out Here, check out the lyrics and then use the media player on the right to hear the song). This week is all about a first experience, and the fruits of experience wrought. The word, 'wrought' (adjective form) itself means worked into shape by artistry or effort. See how things are coming 'round?
My pastor's sermon on Sunday was all about the fear that paralyzes. How faith is sometimes wading through that fear to follow where we are led, regardless of how high the waters. She used the story of Moses parting the Red Sea to illustrate her point: it turns out that scholars and translators have a different take on this parting of the waters thing than we laypeople understand from movies like The Prince of Egypt. As it turns out, the waters probably didn't part so Moses and crew could see clear to the other side. But they probably had to start walking through the waters hip-deep, before they cleared fully. Like God, there was water before and behind them, all around them, and what an act of faith that must have been! To begin walking into the sea believing God would make a way but having no proof of that act, as the waters slapped around your waist and soaked you, skin-deep.
Her sermon on fear instigated my own thoughts on fear and the ways it has paralyzed me in the past. I found myself thinking that maturity-- growing up-- is about conquering that paralyzing fear and doing something new. Maturity is about experience. Fear keeps us from experience. If like Moses, we can be more faithful than fearful, the experience wrought from fighting that paralysis is maturity. And the greater the fear and the further distance we travel in our act of faith, the more experience wrought, the more mature we will be. Standing on the banks of another land, with a sea teeming between who we were and who we have become by making faith more important than fear, we'll finally understand. Experience wrought.
So how does this tie in? Well. My paralyzing fear has been being NOTICED. How sad is it that I would rather hide than stand out? I have restrained myself from acting, speaking, and living into the gifts God has given me, the potential I have, because I don't want people to see me. And people haven't. And that is part of why my heart is broken; because I have hidden and then expected people to see me anyway. This week has proven that, beyond a shadow of a doubt (if someone you know starts consistently wearing solid black and not smiling and actually telling people that she's UNWELL-- well, at least have a discussion about it). I'm not going to hide myself anymore. I want to learn to preach. I have been feeling drawn to the pulpit for some time, but always afraid that I would say something wrong, or that I have a problem speaking in front of people, or that I could never be so obviously seen. I've finally caught up with what I've been thinking: that I don't care what people think of me. I am ready to be seen.
So, from the top of the mountain, I'm jumping into the sea.
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