The best saints find themselves dull, and dead, and slow, and therefore pray to God to quicken them, an except taken from Matthew Henry's Commentary On The Whole Bible, page 751.
Grief has snuck up on me once again. Thoughts of my sister flood in, with her moving about and being her full of antics self. The images would make me grin if it weren't for the flood of tears that soak my face. I grieve too, for a marriage that died early on the vine, despite how long my former husband and I were a couple. Gone too soon, sister; ended too early and not soon enough, romantic love?
I haven't been able to get it together, so to speak. I haven't been able to shake inertia, which is always a symptom for me of sorrow unattended. I feel dull, dead, and slow ... with no where to go, and why go anywhere? When death comes to visit and wants to have a terrible tete a tete, who am I to walk away? I must converse, I must stay, and hear it's garbled grotesque message. Thief, you dirty rotten thief, that is what I want to yell to the deafening silence, but I don't want anyone to hear for fear of disturbing their peace too; my family has their own grief, and timing to express it.
It isn't just me. I know it isn't just me: others feel this too. Some days we carry on as though nothing is amiss, as though nothing has changed and yet it has, and we cannot get back what was, no matter how we try to reconfigure things in our thinking to accommodate the desire for a different outcome. I can't, I just cannot get people back, pull them close and say, Let's do this again, shall we?
Why ask for a quickening when I am dealing with the harsh reality of death, of departing, of the close of life, of relating, with one, two, three, or more people that float in the peripheral vision of my minds eye as reminders of love had, and love lost too? The never agains come a calling with death: they are ugly twins.
My son wisely said these words, years ago: Life goes on. He did not coin the phrase, but it has echoed and reverberated in my memory when I need it the most, to remind me that while I am here, there is a reason, and that feeling dull, dead, and slow, is part of being alive in a world gone mad, even if it feels like I am swooning and disengaging. Grief is like that; it makes us feel like we are coated in molasses, disabled from moving about and perhaps a little exhausted from trying to.
Today I grieve. It is different from just plain old crying. Grief interrupts everything and demands attention. Ignoring it only makes it more demanding, and one simply cannot run and hide, not for very long that is.
It isn't just me ... isn't that right, dear reader?
When my younger sister entered the dying area of the hospital to be with us while we stood bedside, while my older sister's soul still remained in her body, she made me proud. She wailed loudly, her soul crying out for mercy. She didn't give a damn who heard her ... she could not help herself, and that, dear one, is what sorrow ought to look and feel like. Death, the dirty rotten thief, must be greeted as an enemy; by God in heaven, people have yet to understand this, since platitudes and well wishes of RIP are the stupid minded norm of thoughtless people, that have yet to learn that never again is forever.
May the peace of Christ be yours, dear one. It is the only peace that works as salve for the soul. To live, truly is Christ, and to die, is gain ... this means I live past the life Jesus saved me from (my sins are forgiven) to live the life he saved me for ... eternity, with my Redeemer.
While people die, the Redeemer lives and grants us what we do not deserve: forever in his Presence when we belong, to him. That, is the quickening.
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