Wednesday, February 7, 2007

A fear realised...

In 2005 I participated in a ministry training school on the island of Cyprus. I was there for six months doing everything from outreach to scrubbing bathrooms and from learning how to live in community to severe personal change. In any case we had each week to answer a few questions creatively in this journal. One week we were to write out our most daunting fear, either spiritual or physical I can't remember exactly, my greatest fear is this: to be emotionally and spiritual dead. To spend the days, weeks, months of my life in front of the TV or doing something that my heart is not in. To not be effected by an event, to not feel passionately about anything, to not feel at all. To not see Jesus in people, to not be able to hear His voice, to not love. I never want to be in that place.

Well in fact I got as close to that fear as I ever want me to be, I got right up next to it and was just about to throw my hands up when i got back from France to Tennessee on December the 20th, 2006. I was around the family that I loved, a new nephew that I hadn't even seen before and I could hardly experience any of it. I couldn't feel. I had killed something inside of me while I was overseas and it was in danger of being lost forever. As the story goes and as God would have it, there is restoration. It is slow and like in movies, hell, like in real life things heal slower than we would like. This thing called my heart, this thing that died in me as I was in Sweden and France is slowly, painfully slowly, coming back to life again.

1 comment:

earl sullivan said...

"i went up to the mountain
because you asked me to
up over the clouds
to where the sky was blue
i could see all around me
everywhere
i could see all around me
everywhere

sometimes i feel like
i've never been nothing but tired
and i'll be walking
till the day i expire
sometimes i lay down
no more can i do
but then i go on again
because you ask me to

some days i look down
afraid i will fall
and though the sun shines
i see nothing at all
then i hear your sweet voice, oh
oh, come and then go, come and then go
telling me softly
you love me so

the peaceful valley
just over the mountain
the peaceful valley
few come to know
i may never get there
ever in this lifetime
but sooner or later
it's there i will go
sooner or later
it's there i will go"
PG