Peniel - Day 3...1:09pm

I broke and wept, but I shut it back down quickly. It scared me. No, I’m not afraid to cry. I used to cry quite easily, and while the tears don’t flow as quickly as they used to for me, I still have less trouble with that concept than many who are afraid to show their pain or emotions or lose control of the heart’s pressure cooker. I don’t tie whether or not I cry to my manhood. The shortest verse in the Bible is a two-word sentence, “Jesus wept.” If God can cry, so can I.

But this scared me, because it wasn’t a release of the pressure built up in my soul so much as an explosion of the container. The pain, hopelessness, despair, and sheer pointlessness of it all just washed over me in an instant. I felt as though I’d been plunged into icy waters that have no bottom. I couldn’t breath, would quickly drown, and die. Since I am not quite ready to give up on encountering God on this plane rather than the next, I couldn’t surrender to the desire to just let the waters swallow me. Although I am usually a just jump into the cold and let it steal your breath away, get it over with quickly person, I know that these waters I must ease into if I am to survive. But the release is needed. I need those tears to fall and wash away the poison that’s killing my heart and soul.

For too long I have been dealing with the symptoms, with the leaves and shoots and branches in my life. Maybe once in a while with the trunk, but I haven’t gotten near the root, not even in a quite fearless and thorough moral inventory, where I saw more trunks than branches. Tired and lethargic? That was likely the small branches of depression. So I treated the depression. And in doing so, I realized that under the depression was the larger limbs of anger, so I tried to give my anger to God and learn ways to mange it and release it. Then looking more closely I see that the anger goes back for years, a huge trunk in the tree of my life from early childhood. And that’s as much as I’ve been able to see. But I know that under the ground that stops my vision, beneath the canopy of exhaustion, depression and anger, is a root in my heart that is scarred and wounded somehow, and that that wound is poisoning my entire tree of life. There’s something wrong, that has been wrong for a very long time, that is causing the visible signs in the trunk, branches and leaves of my life. It’s time to quite trying to doctor what I can see and get to the root of the problem.

I feel as though my entire life has been hindered. The most important experiences of life are out of reach. Obstacles such as fear and the past, interfere with relationships, with self-image, with performance and achievement, with happiness. The destructive behaviors the symptoms of my wounds made it feel natural to choose have repeatedly halted the progress of my life. Anger cost me so much. I have lost important people and opportunities for years to this little luxury I can no longer afford, and feel burning me up from the inside out, even now. I have been frozen and imprisoned by fear. Guilt has eaten me like a cancer, quietly killing me as I pretended it was not even there. Symptoms, each and every one.

I have tried the focusing on each major symptom to fix my life. Trust God to dispel fear. Accept forgiveness and erase the guilt. Stop treating my everything with drugs and alcohol and my life would get better. And it has. But the truth is I have a shattered soul. And fixing the cracks on the surface of my life will not give it stability and integrity. The fissures go too deep. They must be fixed below the surface or the foundation will simply shift and crack again and again, repair after repair. But right now, the symptoms are in the way of getting to the problem. I am so angry and lost in the darkness of a past I can’t erase or escape that I can’t see to get at the real problem. My life has been a season of destruction, and the healing is not going to be a simple process of identifying and dealing with one or two issues.