Imagine for me just a second [or a few minutes]. Even if you realize this is nothing how your morning goes, keep on imagining as if you are in the thick of it. It's OK, it's good for your brain to do this.
You just woke up. You pull yourself out of bed, fumble around for your towel and head toward to the bathroom, hoping you won't run into any walls that had somehow gotten bigger while you were sleeping. Turning the shower water on, you use the toilet and wait for the water to warm up. When you see just the edges of the mirror starting to fog up, you get into the shower. As you slowly go through the shampooing of your hair and washing your body with your raggedy luffa, the events of yesterday, the day before and the day ahead begin to trickle into the grooves of your brain. The insane dream of the dragon eating your sofa with your dog as a condiment that you had been trying to make sense of just moments earlier gets tossed to the side as reality sets in. The situation that you don't really want to deal with, the friend that made you want to rip a light fixture out of the ceiling because of a ridiculous disagreement, and the thing you stupidly agreed to do because you felt pressured all begin to make your stomach feel like an elephant had decided to have it's babies in it. After ten minutes, you get out of the shower, grab your towel and wrap it around your decidedly clean body.
Freeze. Keep on imagining with me but take a still shot of yourself right now. There you are. Naked underneath your towel, your skin red from the steam and uneven from your goosebumps that are starting to form. You hair hangs wet around you [boys, work with me] and you have large black circles underneath your eyes from the make-up you didn't wash off the night before. It's just you with that heavy feeling in the pit of your stomach, feeling decently ugly under your own standards.
Most people don't ever freeze there. They just keep going..get dried off, dressed, put on some make-up, struggle to come up with something cute and creative to do with their hair, grab some coffee on the way out the door and plow through the day, hoping that things will smooth themselves out somehow. Hoping that one of the baby elephants will die during the birthing process and lessen the load a bit.
But what happens when you do freeze. When you don't go. When the trendy clothes, the cute hairstyle, the delicious coffee, the best and understanding friend, the familiar church, the perfect hangout with the coolest people you know, the group that you get along with and that is moving in the same direction you are and the comfort of chocolate are gone. What happens when all the normal [and usually good] comforts of life are gone. What happens when all that you use to escape are no longer to to escape into? When you realize that your best efforts to control are not working?
Over the past several months, I've been occasionally waking up like this. A mess. I've also been finding this to be a problem at night, as well, but I won't force you to imagine anything else in this post. It seems there is a tie between the tender moments of when you are just waking up and the quiet moments in your bed that follow the preparation of having another weird dream in which that person whom you hadn't seen or thought of in years is holding your hairbrush hostage again.
I think the connection between the two times is that it is when you are most vulnerable. It's just you, your thoughts and the unsettling feeling that you are not safe. You are not safe from the difficult situations of life. You are not safe from everyday troubles and their is nothing you can do to close yourself off from them. You are not safe and no matter how many people you have in agreement around you or how much stuff you surround yourself with, you cannot hide from reality that is ultimately out of your control. You still have to deal.
So, how do you deal? Quite simply. Read Psalm 62. You will always find safety in Him. It's where the rest comes in, because you know that you don't have to try to control a thing. He has the best plan for you. And craziest thing, He likes to take care of you. He likes to work you though situations that suck. You should try Him out once in awhile. I guarantee those "once in a whiles" will become "always" very soon.
"Pour out your hearts to Him, for God is our refuge." Yes.
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