Tuesday, January 15, 2008

No matter how much energy I use to bunch and fluff and tug at my blanket, forming it in to the approximate mass of a person lying next to me, when a distant train whistles, clattering through the night, and I wake to see the moonlight's reflection on my wall, it's still just me alone in my bed as I have been all these years.
The loneliness comes rushing in, the most familiar of all emotions. I should just make friends with it by this point in life, that's what it wants after all, right?

"Hey, loneliness, what are you up to tonight? Yeah, I'll probably just hang out with myself tonight too, you know, a quiet night at home can sometimes be so refreshing. Uh-huh, yeah, okay, so I'll see you about three in the morning, then?"

I don't think it works like that though. Loneliness doesn't really want to be my friend, otherwise I don't think it'd be quite so mean to me. But when loneliness comes a-callin' and I wake up in the night overwhelmed by the desire to simply be loved by someone, to simply stop waking up alone, that's when I start to think that loneliness is quite the bully.
After I've sat in my own self-pity, or try to tell myself a story to calm my heart, I guiltily remember that I'm never really alone and that God is always with me and all that good stuff. So I ask him for some help, sort of.
If I believe that God as the power to make all nations bow before him, why don't I believe that he also has the power to lay my heart to rest at night beside the heart that dwells inside the person that God made for me?
(Why, WHY, is my belief in God contingent upon tangible love from another human being? More importantly, why to I believe that love has to be given by the type of human who can grow a beard?)
When I whisper shards of prayers that I have been praying for most of my life -- that God will fill my whole heart, that will be my one true love -- I wonder if God will ever fulfill that request. Because even as those mumblings pass through my lips, I don't know if I will ever truly be content with only Jesus, with a lover whose touch does not warm my skin, and the timbre of whose voice is not audible.

2 comments:

Naomi Haverland said...

This post made me feel sad.
Sometimes I wake up and wish there wasn't someone snoring next to me. So then I move to the couch. Now I feel like an ungrateful person.
God knows the desires of your heart. Waiting is excruciating.

Rachel said...

Funny how this is exactly how I feel almost every other night of my life.