Time Will Say Nothing But I Told You So; Time Only Knows the Price We Have to Pay

I’m finding that everything I have ever taken for granted, or even the things I take for granted right now, are more precious than I have ever acknowledged.  I think too much, and act too little.  If my world were to come crashing down around me, what would I cling to?  My relationships?  My mind?  My ability to love? Or would it just be my own flesh?  I fear it would be the latter.  I fear I would hold on to the very thing I pretend I’m trying to rid myself of. 

Being here, realizing it’s all real, is opening my eyes to how much I live in my mind.  I run so often, avoiding life, avoiding challenge.  Here I am: comfortable City Girl, wide-eyed and afraid of reality.  Though I am aware that I should not live in the past, I can’t help but wonder… What if I’d ever loved with everything?  What if I’d ever stepped out of my comfort to hold someone else up?  What if I’d ever sacrificed to know what it might mean to truly love?  I look upon the short life I’ve lived and see—I have lived in fear.  Always.  Fear of too much hurt, too much pain, too much emotion, too much love, or any of that at all.  I have never let anyone in fully, not one soul.  Sometimes I wonder if I’ve ever been in fully.

I think about my time at home, with the people I took for granted, and how I tucked all of it inside of me.  I didn’t tell them how much they meant to me; I didn’t tell myself how much they meant to me.

And when I think of how intricately I was pieced together, how my brain works on this complex system that I cannot even understand, how my heart may be capable of being tough, but that God made it that way for His purpose, I understand that by holding everything I have inside, I am denying the glory of God’s creativity.  As images and smells, and intention and ease, and first nights in Jordan’s basement and last nights under the same purpose, and star-filled skies and giving up, and laughing at nothing for fifteen minutes and sitting this one out, and falling asleep with him and waking up alone, and winding roads and broken headlights, and hills as tall as mountains and deer quiet like our breathing, and empty parking lots and walking away roll over in my mind, all the familiarity has been worn down to the core.  Everything is blurred, and I feel nothing.  To me, there have never been good or bad emotions.  Emotions, in general, are a weight… but what if I exuded them, brilliantly?

What if I loved with everything I had?  What if I let down my guard long enough to let people hurt me, but also long enough to let people love me?  What if I let myself be broken fully so I could fully let God heal me?  What if I sacrificed myself for the glory of the One I call Savior?

 

“And the problem, it seems, is with you and me,

Not the Love who came to repair everything.

And I don’t know what to do with a love like that

And I don’t how to be a love like that.

When all the love in the world is right here among us

and hatred too, and so we must choose what our hands will do.”