Dying

I'm dying.
I mean, parts of me are dying.

Parenting is taking all of me and then some. It feels like everything else is withering. My writing progresses at a snail's pace, if at all. I can't start a new poem right now because I know I'll stay up too late finishing it and then be a cranky mama for my most important people.

Tiny forays into singing and songwriting demand a disproportionate amount of money, organization, sleep, and thought. Sleeplessness, speaking of, has shot to tatters my ability to think, create, converse, focus, know. Also, dishes? Laundry? Ha.

My prayer life is puny and my Scripture reading brief. I barely know my neighbors. I take hours/days/weeks to reply to texts/calls/emails.

I am less. I hope He is more, because I am definitely less.
...

Matthew and I listened to a podcast  last night about taking up our cross, giving everything to gain Christ. The guy said all of us have an obstacle between us and real life.

It might be the love of money or family or education or sex or freedom or approval or influence or pleasure or whatever. Those things aren't the obstacles, but their hold on me might be.

Any love sweeter to me than Christ impedes me from experiencing His abundant life.

And that full, abundant life is not actually found in fulfilling self. It's not found in "being true to myself." (God-given identity is beautiful, but the self was never meant to be a ruler, and when it is given power, it is a total slave driver, capricious and cruel.)

You know what's crazy? The abundant life begins with dying to self. Surrender. It's counterintuitive. The death Christ calls us to, the burial He allows, and the resurrection He most assuredly brings - that is real, ripe, free, big, wide good beautiful LIFE.

So I am struggling to thank God for the things that are killing me. I will only consent to these deaths if I trust my Lover. I will trust Him only if I remember how He has held me.

My whole life, God has been my best friend. The One Who chases me. I remember Him using a lightning storm once in the Rocky Mountains to pierce through a thick spiritual fog. I remember, more recently, a moment in the car when Him shifted some restless anxiety into bold peace. And when I read the Scriptures I see a Lover more passionate than our rebellion. He is better than life. He IS life.

So the self whistles down to the ground and lies buried. She is not dead, He says, only sleeping...