Learning to Lament

This post is long overdue, but finally I have had time to write out a coherent thought. Recently I have found life to very unsettling. So many things pull at my attention and try to grab at me sometimes I feel dizzy as to where I am going. I know that my walk towards Yeshua and discovering the body of Messiah is still in progress, but right now I feel a little dizzy. As a I seek to do all these things yet another aspect of my life is grabbing at me. I am trying to fall deeper and deeper in love with God, and in that seeking I have found that there are parts of my life where I have loved others so deeply that those cracks may never have healed. As I fall in love with Yeshua those things are coming blatently to the surface, and so from those emotions and those thoughts come this blog. I hope that you find it useful to yourself in some way, if not that I am sorry to have wasted your time :P.

Have you ever had a moment where the world around you seems to stop and is replaced by a different world, a world you thought you'd left behind? Where once you stood living your normal life suddenly the moments of a by-gone time, a place, a person, a memory, flood back over and take your senses by storm? Where once you stood, existing in the mundaneness of every day tasks, simply working to try and make time pass by, now time has stopped and gone back and you are once again captured by a feeling that you had believed lost it's grip on you long ago? Suddenly you can't forget what you thought had been forgotten, and you can't seem to move from the spot where that thing you thought you'd conquered has risen from ashes of your memory only to subdue you again. I experienced such a thing today.

The memory, the task, the emotion itself hardly matters. For those curious ones I remembered a girl as I mopped the bathroom floor at work. There she was, not where I had left her. I had left her in my mind. I had moved on; burying what was once there under layer after layer of promises to myself. But today I lamented her. I truly lamented her, and myself. I remembered all the places I had failed her, all the places I had failed myself, and how I had left her to rebuild her soul. I remembered how we had started with such promise and love, and yet in the end I walked away. All of this grabbed me, forcing me to look into what I thought I had left behind. Then just as quickly it was gone, but that slightly nauseas feeling of nostalgia remained floating in my stomach.

It was later I was listening to a series of talks on the book of Lamentations, something I'd started ages ago but never truly committed myself to finishing. It talked about lamenting in a culture of denial. A culture so completely in denial of what it feels and wants and wishes that we cover it up with prescription drugs and self medicating entertainment. There is a time to be angry, to shake our fists, to cry, to weep, to simply look on in despair, and then realize that the worst has happened. There is a time to look at the life we used to live and long after it, to wish that things didn't have to move on. Even though we deeply want them to. There is a time to remember people, and places, and things. Perhaps even wishing that they had ended differently. Then there is a time to move on. Until we properly lament, until we let every single emotion come out and come forward we will never recover. How can I expect to stop grieving when I never finished? I can't. It will simply come back again and again until one day I fully acknowledge what this has done to me, what that memory meant to me. I have to let it come out, or by seeking to repress I will continue to let it grow.

So today I am learning to lament where I have been. I lament those neglected parts of my life. This is, after all, part of the Christian walk isn't it? Learning to become fully human, as I was created? To live the abundant life that Yeshua calls us to? The Way is more than just theology, but a way of living. So today I learn to live by learning to lament.