One afternoon several years ago, I cried out to God from my prayer closet: “Why do you allow me to feel so much pain?”
I was standing in the intersection of old grief and new grief. That summer I wrote many memories in the form of poems, an excruciating process of reliving past hurts. I brought old hurts out in the open on paper, examined the pain, grieved the loss of what they revealed, and worked to put them to rest.
Joy came from the sorrow of my childhood longing and loneliness.
When I withdrew into private worlds of drawing and reading out of loneliness,
In my previous post, I hinted at my childhood confusion in my view of men. Naturally curious, I wanted to know how relationships between the sexes worked. But my view was deeply damaged by my parents’ divorce.
What do your memories signify? Are they markers of personal history? Are they ghosts who haunt you? Burdens or joys? My memories are all those things, and something else: My memories are like stones that commemorate meetings with God.
Stones are markers of memory and permanence.
A range of emotions swept over me as I watched the video clips before the sermon. Shock, since I don’t meet face-to-face with such secular worldviews in my job at a Christian school. A mix of fear and overwhelm and doubt, since I try so hard to prepare my children to be lights in this … Read more