Each day

The truth is each day can be a battle. And I am not sure that it is possible to live life feeling that way.

Each day feels heavy and like gravity is pulling harder, willing me to just lie down, hit the floor and stay there a while.

But this cannot be life. This cannot be the way it is meant to be and it cannot be the way the whole world feels.

Each day cannot be a battle.

I won’t let it.

I will find ways in which I can make the day light and fluffy, finding the cloud to ride across the sky in.

But that might have to be tomorrow.

Or maybe this afternoon, once I figure out how to get the weight off gravity off my chest and change into real clothes and not this cosy dressing gown that keeps me safe.

Each day is a battle in my mind to not be overwhelmed by the amount of pain I see in each post and each news story, the fighting and name calling that I thought was limited to children in a playground.

But I know this isn’t what it really is about, because I know there is a God, much bigger than these things which feel like they overwhelm.

I know there is a God who calmed a storm on a lake having just woken up from a nap, sleep still in his eyes.

I know that there is a God who heals and restores and parted an ocean for a people in peril.

But today it feels heavy, gravity feels like a weighted blanket that weighs me down to sleep and escape.

But my dreams do not allow the sleep to be sweet and the sweat wakes me up, hot and heavy in the fear that they cause.

Where is my faith and where did my hope go?

This heaviness does not need to be life and so I read.

I read the book of letters from across the world, from people who never meant them to be published, and I read the stories of Rebel Girls, created for children to see women differently but encouraging this 30 year old on a bad day.

I find the people I admire and listen to their stories, podcasts stream in my ears giving hope in their words and their lived experience, in their triumph over battles.

And eventually I pick up this book, the oldest and most used one in my room and I turn the pages to those rhythmic gospels.

Matthew, Mark, Luke, John.

The four that role off my tongue.

As I open the thin pages, I begin to breath a bit deeper, and as I read the words of this mans life who changed the course of history. His miracles and his parables and his rhythms hidden in the short sentences in-between. I breath deeper and some of the weight lifts.

I turn the pages to read again of the women at the well and the feeding of the thousands, the calling of the twelve and the sending of seventy. These known old stories enter my brain like a warm bath after a long walk.

But it is different. An edge I hadn’t noticed before.

This man was more than a kind figure in our history books.

He was brave and courageous, he stood for the untouchable and the outcast, he ate with the evil and socialised with the ostracised.

He called out the hypocrisy and he turned the tables of the corrupt.

He was kind and gentle and stern and sure.

He disrupted the cities and towns he walked through and he turned lives inside out.

He knew how to battle for truth.

And he did it by starting in the solitary place.

These in-between sentences that often get forgotten, the ones that say he prayed, he took himself away, he prayed all night…

These in-between sentences that show where his strength came from and where his battle started.

These in-between moments that give us the key.

He didn’t start with the fight or public posts or with the strong words that caused a culture change.

He started with the Father.

He started with the Father, with prayer and communion and a conversation.

Everyday seems like a battle, everyday feels heavy and weighted down.

Until I come to you.

Until I come and sit and pray and read and listen.

Until I lay down the things that feel overwhelming and like gravity pushing me down.

Everyday seems heavy until I turn my head and say hello.

Until I spend time with the Father.

You don’t take it all away and you don’t make me forget the things that feel heavy and overwhelming but somehow you reposition my focus.

My perspective is changed and I see from a new point of view.

The reasons to hope stand clear and strong, the beautiful things of the world project themselves forward and my eyes see those before it all.

You don’t quite make the day light and fluffy like a cloud in the sky, but you bring light, bright light and show me how light shines out the darkness.

And how darkness cannot survive the light.

You show me the different way.

R/