the simple life

reading some random blogs has been a sobering insight into little sadnesses and unspoken cries that constantly happen around you. How awful it is that your life can go on being so...normal and peaceful...even as others face their shadowy valleys. How wicked it is to feel that barest smudge of "wow, i am glad it is not me" that betrays the terror of your own sinful heart.

If I am ever tempted to feel proud or arrogant of the relative stability and happiness I have found in my own walk, I must remind myself to love, to sympathise, to empathise. I must remember to be still, be quiet and try and hear the needs around me.

Because i remember my own share of dark lonely hours - Where it was just me, God, a sleeping city and the open sky to weep to. These moments are always at night, when things are quiet and dead. Where removed from all the noise and cacophony we surround ourselves with, you are left naked with your own thoughts. And you suddenly understand the one nasty fact of a fallen world: no matter how many lovely friends you have, there are some moments where you are going to be alone and nobody else can follow you no matter how much they desire to. And you know this kind of existential loneliness is not the loneliness that will be solved by any normal human being you can conjure - family, friend, husband.

These are the moments where you most keenly feel the need for God - the invisible God, the sweet mystery you secretly sense behind every flower bud and distant star, the One who speaks straight into your heart the tiny whisper of hope that we cling to in despair: You matter. I love you. You will get through this because you are Mine Own. You don't see me. You don't understand me. But you will understand this - I love you. And if you understand this, live your life in rememberance of Me. Love Me. Love Thy Neighbour. Love with everything you have. Because You are Mine.

So this is my life:
I wake and rise to a life I never earned.
I try to remember to praise. I give thanks.
I work. I teach children to think, to find depth and beauty in the world, to see a big picture beyond.
I remember lives that cross my way. I try to figure out why they cross my way.
I try to meet needs. I try to love. I make mistakes.
I wound. I bite my tongue. I apologise. I talk. I laugh.
I dream and hope and fear. I place all these dreams, hopes and fears into His hands.
Sometimes they come true. Sometimes they don't.
I sleep and find rest in a grace and peace I never earned.

that's all that is important to know at the end of days. It is a simple life.
I hope I continue in that simple life. I hope more people find that simple life.

So tonight - in the stillness of 2am - I want to remember the weary and the broken-hearted, the ones who despair late at night beneath the smile they put on in the day, the ones who keep their pains hidden:

I cannot offer you anything but a hope and a prayer and a promise: there is a God who can be all these things that I cannot be to you and yours. I want to be there for you but I will be found wanting and pathetically, woefully inadequate. But God won't and never will be insufficient. He loves, He remembers. And for that, so will I try to do so for the rest of my days. That's my promise to you. Hold me to that promise. Please.