When we fight back with joy, we embrace the deepest reality of our identity, which is not a weary-beaten-down one but is a beloved-joyful-one//Margaret Feinberg
There's a thing that happens when you cry, or rather, when you are trying to keep yourself from crying, where your throat closes up and you feel like you are slowly being choked to death. The brain and body disagree, without reaching a true compromise--your thoughts commanding the tears to go back up into their rightful place, with your eyes mercilessly noncomplying. And you are fighting, tirelessly, to hold it all together. It's exhausting, this task, and at times you wonder if is worthwhile to keep trying.
It is from this place that I have slowly learned: you cannot shut your emotions down without killing a part of yourself.
Thus, an action that was meant to protect from vulnerability becomes a weapon disguised, Because something will always replace the emotions that you are trying so hard to forget, something will steal your hope. Will turn you into someone you don't recognize, will hollow you out until you become unfeeling and cold, devoid of the joy that was meant to light up your soul.
We become impenetrable and heartless, because the world has convinced us it is too much to bear.
And this is why, I think, our body responds the way it does when we try to keep ourselves from crying. From responding to the pain around us, from feeling every ounce of feeling this life has to offer. Our souls are screaming, out to our fingers and down to our toes and everything, everything hurts. We are connected, and love is a cost that does not come without loss. But our body knows the difference--knows that to keep it in is to deny truth, knows that we are breaking our spirit, suffocating the thing that makes us human.
And yet, it feels safer to kill hope. To walk through life with power, control firmly within our grasp. To know that we cannot be crushed if we simply do not believe in anything--if we take no chances on ourselves and others. We hide. And in doing so, we die.
Hope is a terrifying word. But in this time, at this hour, in the light of all that I have found about God to be true, it weighs so beautifully upon my shoulders. Because if I believe in the cross, if I believe...then my hope is not in vain. My feelings are not unanswered. My tears do not fall without purpose.
Because all the pain and sorrow that this world has thrown and has yet to throw at me shows me that there is something that is worth fighting for. That the battle to exchange hope for safety is an illusion, a poison that kills and not protects.And everything in me, even my tears, is telling me that I cannot deny hope the power it so undeniably has in every corner, every crevice of my heart. A heart that has been saved irrevocably by grace.
And so, I must choose hope to live.
One of my favorite stories in the Bible is the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. When his dear friend passed, Jesus responded with an all-encompassing, deep seated, excruciating sorrow that he did not try to stifle. And yet, he knew that he would see Lazarus alive and well, he knew that he would bring him back to life. He felt the pain, but fought back with life. With hope. He did not let his present reality rob him of the joy he knew was coming.
Don't let your fear of vulnerability win out. Let your tears come, messy though they may be.
It's the season for bringing things back to life.
Let your heart be the first of them.
