My Favorite Verses - Vol I (thru Sept 14)

1 Corinthians 10:13 … transcending trials
(01/10/2013)
To all who suffer or have suffered:
To live is to choose to Love; to Love especially when you have no stomach
for it — especially when everything you’ve ever held dear crumbles like burnt paper
in your hands; crumbles to dust in front of your hopeful eyes … and you try to take a
breath but your throat is filled with the silt of your despair.
It’s to choose to Love even when grief is sitting right next to you, with its
stank-steamy, tropical-heat thickening the air around your mouth; air somehow
heavier than water — more fit for gills than lungs.
It’s to choose to Love when grief weights you down like your own flesh, only
more of it — lots more of it; a veritable obesity of grief … When all you can think,
over & over again, is “How can I withstand this? How can I live through even this
single empty now?”
And yet you DO choose to take that breath …
You DO choose to live through that moment …
You DO choose to reach out and take hold of life again.
You take hold of it as if it were a child’s face resting gently between your
palms –- a plain face, mind you; one with no sweet smile, no sapphire eyes, no
charming lips. And you are holding this small, plain, almost-homely face in your
time of seemingly greatest sadness. You are holding it there and you are hurting and
you would just as soon turn away and give up … And yet instead you choose to
smile upon that face; you smile upon it and softly say, “Yes, my child … I will take
you with me. Yes, I will Love you again.”
That, my Friends, is what it
means to truly Live; not to someday
know a deeper joy or one day feel a
contentment more lasting, but rather
to be covered in your deepest pain and
soaked in your most acute distortion
of self, and yet choose to rise
regardless and stride boldly forth into
this next new day.
Amen … Let it be so.
(inspired by Ellen Bass)
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