Go to the Depths

“Yet if I speak, my pain is not relieved;
    and if I refrain, it does not go away.

-.Job 16:6

I know you don’t want to go deep. Don’t want to cut yourself open and expose the hurt and deception and loss that have butchered your heart.

It’s not a good place to be. But the more we let it swim around inside us, the longer it can infect and poison our souls. In order for us to move upwards and on to all God has for us, we must face the rough parts of our stories, the pages we’d rather skip and not read. But they’d still be there bleeding, and we need to air out our wounds and find the healing salve Jesus offers.

We all deal with different circumstances. I don’t know what plagues you each day, what haunts you at night when the light winks off and your thoughts and memories strike, vivid, up close and aggressive. No matter how you try to push them down, still they rise, relentless.

My heart breaks with you. As hot, searing tears streak down your face, they dampen your pillow, polluting your hopes Because at some point, you might be tempted to loosen your dreams from your h:eart, disbanding and swallowed by disappointment and defeat.

You don’t want to go to the depths because it will remind you of the bitter moments that sit sour in your mouth. But we need fresh air. A cleanse. And the only way to the top of that mountain air is from the valley’s edge.

You may have lost a loved one, someone who saw the best in you, especially when you struggled to see it yourself. You may have had to scratch a way through living, bouncing around home to home, desperately craving consistency only to be uprooted yet again. You may have longed for a relationship that filled what your heart craved, put your affection into another, chest crumbling as you hold the remnants of their scent when they turned and walked away and left you shivering in this severing of hearts.

Whatever the reality, you are no longer the plucky, innocent girl who went about the world fresh and bright-eyed, filled with such a glow and eagerness to unlock the possibilities that stretched sunny before you. But you can begin again. Give the scars to God and let Him heal slow, carefully, gently and precise. I promise, you can rise again. Your heart is resilient and the power of hope is strong and will not stay down.

Go to the depths. Plunge into the pain, for God is here, in the hard, ready and willing to meet you at the bottom, bring you back to the surface, to the heights.