“I will seek what was lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen what was sick.”
Ezekiel 34:16a (NKJV)
I’ve spent much time reflecting on the word gesture, and this is what I discovered: A gesture is a verb. An action meant to show an emotion, feeling, or thought toward another person or situation. In other words, a gesture is meaningful but small. It’s not everything, but it IS something. If attention is not paid, it could be easy to miss it. A grand gesture, on the other hand, is intended to catch the receiver’s attention. If a gesture walks into the room and taps you on the shoulder, a grand gesture bounds into the room and yells, “Look at me!”
I think that sometimes trips us up. We have this expectation that every experience with God should be grand. If we don’t come away “feeling all the feels,” then we believe that either He is mad at us or He simply doesn’t care. The latter is what I convinced myself was the case for me. I would read the Bible and see the amazing things God did. Water to wine! Blind eyes receiving the gift of sight! Skin diseases gone in an instant! Dead people raised to life! It seemed that every gesture I read about was grand. Things that would take your breath away.
I went to church, and it was the same. From the pulpit, I heard how God supernaturally provided several thousand dollars for a mission trip, how He pulled cancer from a sick body, and how He opened closed wombs. It was beautiful and amazing and, yes, breathtaking. I rejoiced with people, and yet there was a part of me that felt left out. What kept me awake at night was the fear that God couldn’t see me anymore. That in the crazy chaos of the cosmos, I just got lost.
Those years of feeling lost were some of the worst I have ever gone through. Looking back, I can see that loss was the song playing on repeat in my heart. During that season, I lost a parent suddenly and unexpectedly in one of the worst ways I could imagine. My husband, kids, and I lost our support system when we had to walk away from the church we had been part of for several years. I had to face head-on the loss of a dream that had been tucked deep inside me for most of my life. Friends that I held dear could not find their way to walk beside me in this season, and I felt the loss of them deeply.
Those losses were hard to be sure, but the spiritual fallout went much deeper. I lost my center. For the first time in years, maybe ever, I lost hope. I lost trust. I lost confidence and courage, and oh, did I lose peace! I lost the perspective that God always wins and is always for me. And there it is. I lost the knowledge, the deep in my gut knowing, that we – God and I – were in this together.
I remember telling my daughter once that God will always be the constant in her life. He has been, and will be, the ONLY constant. I told her that change is a natural part of life and to do her best to embrace it. If she cannot find it in herself to embrace it (sometimes we can’t), then to always remember that there is ONE that will never change. There is ONE that stays constant when the world around us seems unstable. Good advice, right? Yes, good… until you lose your center.
I remember the exact day I lost it. It was a beautiful autumn New England day. The sky was my favorite color of blue. M&M blue, as my friend Judy would call it. The trees adorning our yard were dressed in hues of red, orange, yellow, and deep purple. It was warm but not hot. Any other day, I would have been basking in the beauty of Fall. Not today. In my heart, it was the dead of winter. Like Narnia’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, this day felt like “always winter and never Christmas.” I remember feeling cold. So cold. Cold to the point of shivering. Applying more and more layers of clothing did nothing. I could not get rid of the chill. My thoughts tumbled around and around in a jumbled mess, grasping for a safe place to land but never finding relief. As the hours of the day dragged on, I kept having to remind myself to breathe. Time and time again, I would feel my chest start to burn and realize that I had been holding my breath.
The thing I remember the most, though, was that I felt so alone. I was in my own house with my two children and my husband – the people I hold most dear in this life- and I ached with loneliness. I knew something inside me had changed. A truth whose script was so ancient that it must’ve been carved on the inside of me somehow had disappeared.
Fighting panic, I remember forcing myself to act overly cheerful so that I wouldn’t fall apart in front of the kids. You know how we parents do that? I was immensely excited about the frozen pizzas we were having for dinner. I laughed hard at the sitcom we watched together while eating. I was silly and funny and did everything I could to not let on like my world was in pieces. How could I explain that I had just lost the very center of my being? That the very thing that had held me together all these years was now gone?
So, there I was, feeling lost, alone, and abandoned. Let me tell you something about that combination—it’s a slippery slope to travel. It’s toeing the edge of a precipice, grasping an armful of weights. It’s hitting the bottom and discovering that quicksand is what cushioned your fall. That is where the email found me that day. At the very bottom, my heart and mind lodged deep in quicksand. But instead of looking down and seeing sand, saltwater, and clay dragging me toward death, I saw hopelessness and despair and fear.
I was in that place for months… no, honestly, years. I could not shake it off. I could not get it back. I could not make sense of what had happened. Sometimes, I pretended that all was well between God and I… but it was my own heart I was trying to protect. I walked through my days waiting for something to fall back into place, for the seeming wrongs to right themselves.
The walls around my heart began to echo what I had decided was the truth. And they were deafening. They cried out that I had been abandoned. That I had pushed God away. They whispered that I would never feel Him again, that the aching, desperate, insatiable gnawing I felt in my gut was simply proof that He was No. Longer. With. Me.
Something I think is important to stress here is that this season of loss was not “in like a lion, out like a lamb”. Yes, some losses hit fast and hit hard and left me gaping in their wake. But other losses came slowly, one chip to my heart at a time. Sometimes, the loss was so faint, almost a passing whisper, just enough to leave me a bit unsettled, but something I could easily shake off or reason away. But over time, all the whispers and all the screams grew loud enough to overpower the distractions I had put in their way. No, it wasn’t a quick descent into the pit, just a stream of steady hits to my heart, my emotions, my relationships, my faith, my hope.
I have learned that loss and grief are unpredictable. You cannot reason with them, nor easily tuck them away. They must be felt. They must be processed. They must be given time and space. Perhaps it was a bit of a “perfect storm” situation, where many small factors, put in line with big factors, created a storm surge that left me swirling alone in darkness. That may be some of it, but in my heart, I know that the biggest factor is that in all those losses, I lost sight of the source of Light. And as the waves pummeled me over and over, I stopped looking for the light. And darkness closed in.