Beat again

Beat again

The thoughts about this song concerned that moment in time, when it hits you that the chaos is here with you and here to stay for a while.  It is that moment when the worst part of the story sinks in to the foaming and stirring oceans that rage within you. The clouds had been gathering for a while but like any other person, I hopped they would disappear and the sun would come out again. It was the moment I realized that I had to learn to live with a few facts that had to be accepted by my mind and heart.

I had been going through a lot in life with school, friends, and my walk with God.

My mind suddenly seemed incapable of understanding or even accepting it all. Those facts caused so much entropy and inward tumult.  I asked myself how anyone could ever contend with such a struggle, yet I knew that I had to. What was happening to me was part of life.

For a time, I had the inkling that something was not right. Yes, external happenings had their inward influence. But inside, it felt ten times worse than what had happened on the outside.

It’s like it all sunk in that my heart was under attack in some way.

It hit me that I was going through all these things and I had to deal with it all rightly. I had been reluctant to admit that this is where God had allowed me to reach but there was this knowledge of his hand directly involved in all I went through. Somehow, that didn’t make me feel completely better. It made me more scared and despairing.

I knew most of what I was going through I had gotten myself into. I knew that if this affected me more than it should it would still be my fault. I looked back in retrospect wishing my life had made different turns from the ones I had made. If that was so I wouldn’t be where I am, but there I was and somehow I knew I had to reach and endure this point id I was to move on.

There was a way it was rock bottom but somehow I was moving and doing things. In my head, everything about me had completely shut down. I even wondered where the will to press on came from. I was in bewilderment at the situation itself; every ability to continue with the normal was such a surprise. To do assignments and hand them in on time, to go to class, do be part of church, to socialize with my friends; all of it was happening even while I feel like my insides were being consumed in a sulfurous concoction of chaos.

So one evening after a long week at school, I got back home and these thoughts filled my mind. I was sort of stilled and silenced by how big and serious it all seemed. My heart felt dead but there I was breathing in and out, living life normally or with the capacity to do so.

I sat and wondered in my room at how I would deal with it all. What would I depend on? Time to even things out?  Some magic trick and suddenly it would all be over? A new habit to distract me? A shrink probably? lol

I knew I had to go through this and that made me scared. In panic I instinctively recoiled at the thought of a pain- like endurance. I felt I didn’t have it in me to persevere.

It would be like that moment when the doctor said you had a disease that would kill you unless you accepted to take a sort of medicine that albeit would cause you more pain, would make you well too. In that moment, I was considering dying from the disease anyway because I knew what the healing process would entail.

My prayer was simply that God would keep my heart safe from me.

The Psalmist in Psalms 139 asks the Lord to search his heart and know his ways, to try him and know his thoughts, to see if there is any wayward way in him and lead him to life everlasting.

It is like within himself he knew what he struggled with; he struggled with himself. He struggled with his fear that wanted to overwhelm his courage to do the right thing, especially when he knew what the right thing was. He knew how prone he was to despair even with the truth of God’s faithfulness experiences and manifested in his life again and again.

He didn’t trust himself to know his heart even when he knew it. He trusted him who made it and him that is perfect. He trusted in the God who knew him in and out more. He trusted in the purpose of the father that had made him.

Somehow here I was understanding all this wretchedness in what I was going through and myself, but somehow the hope was in the fact that God’s knowledge and purpose and will surpassed, or wasn’t constrained by that wretchedness, however dark it was.

He would keep my heart safe from me, even if that’s what it took; that horrible and dreadful healing process. And so as I prayed that in that moment my heart would beat again from its deadness,  that dead heart hoped and knew that God would keep it and it would live again.

In the midst of the chaos I had to remember that pain is never meaningless, nothing is wasted and that a beating heart is always light….

 and heavy.