one day's curse, another day's blessing

I feel depressed tonight. 

Sometimes when it rains, it pours. That's how the last couple of days feel to me.

I think one of the hardest things about making our way through life is less the specific events of it as much as the difference between the things we hope and what we actually live. Contentment is 99% acceptance and what the remaining 1% is I don't know. There is so little I know at all; less and less as each year passes, I age, fill out my womanhood; less about Jesus, less about me. 

But still I retain a thousand bright, childlike hopes within my being, like a herd of gentle cows; I feed them rich grass, cool water, and strawberry smoothies until their hides grow glossy, until they're nearly more alive than me even. I do this because I can't stop myself, though I understand, painfully, approaching now my 30s, that the details will mostly play out far distant from what I wish. I wanted to be married right now to a man I once loved and I am not. I wanted my friends to have their babies free of cancer, our childhood softball games to continue despite miles between us, for new friends to wait for me, for my eyes to have more smile creases than worry wrinkles. They do not. I wanted Tia Liliana to get fat, her hair to come back thick, and gentle Laura to return home to her mother - but she did not. She died, Liliana, today.

I'm unjaded enough that the gulf between my inner hopes and outer reality still comes as a surprise, but I am not sure how long that can last. It hurts. My prayers get shorter and shorter. Lately, they consist of only these three:

Help.

Please keep me from screwing it up.

and, most of all,

Keep me soft, Lord.

This last one I credit for my lack of cynicism. I guess I am willing to live with the heartache in order to keep it.


Liliana is in heaven. I still believe in heaven. I still believe in love which is true, if not true love. I believe in other forms of beauty when mine feels vastly elusive. I believe in believing, though tonight I am tired, I have a bad cold, my nose won't stop dripping, and what is pressing down on me feels like when you wake up, sleepily, stretching, and then remember he broke up with you.

That's how I feel tonight. You can read what Sara wrote about it here.