So Empty, So Estranged

H,

The feeling of emptiness is what so easily leads us astray. It comes to me in the morning, mostly. I get out of bed with some effort. I need to arrange my thoughts, still my heart and remember myself. I need to write stuff down. If I do not then I am in the thrall of my own doubts and fears and wants and weaknesses.

In the end, there is no one day cure for feeling cut off from the divine. The truth is made manifest over the many days of a full life. You do not need the closeness of God on the first day you give your life over to Him. You need it for every day after.

The tide changes. The presence seems to fade but the deeper you go, the closer He is with no physical signs to support it. The early days of sweetness and spirit give in to tedium and the weight of living.

The thing to always remember is to do whatever you can daily to remind yourself that you are not empty and are not estranged from your father anymore. The great book gives us some solid advice: prayer, study, fellowship and the expression of our oft declared love for God in being kind, patient, gentle, forgiving of others like us, stuck on this plane till Kingdom come. You cannot take these things as rules to follow though. That will always trip you up. Worse still, you must not make a check list of the life in God.

It all must come from the spirit. We must always connect. We pray so we can connect. We pray so we can become all the things He knows we can be. We pray to talk, to say we do not understand, to strip off weights and take on strength. There is no other way. Proximity to the rising sun will chase away the dark. There is no other way.

And oh, you will fall many times. This is not a perfect trajectory. The thing you will struggle with the most is dealing with your own failure. Yet, this the trick. This is the whole thing. There is no shortcut to glory. Your struggle in the dark is necessary. It makes it possible for you to let go of the fiction you have about your own basic goodness. The light comes to end the dark. It always starts with your own. Come back to it when you fall. Dust off the floor and kneel again. This is the power of the blood of Christ. Guard your heart. Do not let anything in that tells you it is better to give in and die than to live forever. Love is eternal, sin is not. We shall overcome. He already has. We are His disciples. When we speak His word, we are His apostles. We are His, so we cannot fail.  

The light has come to end the dark.