Where Is the Sun?

The last year or two has really knocked the wind out of me. I find myself mentally lethargic, tired, and fighting depression and or anxiety nearly every day. The easiest explanation for this is that I am sick. And being sick effects your mind and emotions…especially the Lyme kind of sick.

I used to write all the time. Like it was breathing in and out for me. Now I feel so stuck. There’s a half finished novel saved to my computer somewhere because the theme of my writing seems to be gone.

My late teens and twenties were my most prolific in terms of writing. I wrote my novel, kept up a blog, wrote for a second blog, wrote a movie script, wrote Sunday School material. I loved it. I wrote to process what I was feeling, to think clearly, to write things that would inspire people or give them hope, and mostly to tell them that life, existence, was an intrinsic good because it came from God who was good. That life, in spite of it’s pain (and yes, there was plenty of that for me even then) was good.

But now, for the first time in my life, I have not felt the goodness of life down in my bones. Objectively, I know that it is good. But it mostly feels like a blinding fog to get through and survive until you can’t anymore and then you die.

I often ask myself if there are good things to look forward to yet, before Heaven. And I hope that there are. But I can’t often see them on the horizon. Haven’t seen them for a long time.

Through the last several days, the lines from a song keep presenting themselves to me: “Though I may know both joy and woe, some day I shall see clearly, that He has loved me dearly.”

And I hang onto the words “someday I shall see clearly,” because today I don’t see clearly at all. That fog just doesn’t lift. I don’t feel loved by God. I don’t feel hopeful. I don’t feel inspirational. I just feel bleak and next door to emotionally dead. So, I hope that the Holy Spirit had people like me in mind when he prompted Paul to say, “For now I see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”

And as for whether God loves me or not…I cannot feel it directly. But I take some comfort in the words of C.S. Lewis when he wrote to his friend, “Gratitude exclaims, very properly, ‘How good of God to give me this.’ Adoration says, ‘What must be the quality of that Being whose far-off and momentary coruscations are like this!’ One’s mind runs back up the sunbeam to the sun.”

I thought of this while I laid on my bed, grieving over days lost, an empty house with no children in it, good ambitions quashed by physical limitation, the battle against an anxiety that looms like a dark shadow on the wall where no shadow should be. Jonathon had his arms around me while I cried and I thought that he must be one of the sunbeams Lewis was talking about—a line from Heaven to me to help me bear what I have no choice but to bear. And Argos with his beautiful brown eyes, and Cora with her saucy attitude and the tiny kitten I took care of for a day and for the sun itself when the weather is fine and all I can do is look at it.

I am not a good Christian, nor the world’s greatest writer. But sometimes I have to say something, and so here it is.