thoughts on today

I have walked past my computer about a thousand times in the last week and wondered if I should write anything. Words usually come pretty easily to me, but I find myself stalling out in a lot of ways lately.

I discovered I'm apparently in desperate need of anti-anxiety drugs. I've never been one to take pills, of any kind, though as I share my dependence on them of late, I'm amazed at how many people out there in the universe are also somewhat addicted to something. My doctor prescribed them for me before we were even out of the hospital and while I resisted in the beginning, I happily pop one pink pill every night before bed and coast the mediocrity of feeling pretty much zilch for the next 24 hours. I hadn't realized that perhaps the numbness I've noted was due to the medicine until I - stupidly - thought I'd ditch it for a couple of days. What resulted was an afternoon spent throwing pottery off my back porch just to watch it break. The sound of the shattering and the great splay of shards was certainly cathartic, but now I've got pieces of mug to go sweep up and there aren't any more dishes just lying around that I'd feel good about chucking. So drugs, it is, for me. Whether mediocrity and broken china are at all equally problematic, I don't know. I often suspect it'd be better for me to break every dish in the house if only to be real, to feel fully what my heart and mind and even my lungs should feel, but for now, I'm halfheartedly accepting the somewhat feigned sense of control and normalcy my medicated life is giving me.

The grieving feels like a battle waged inside: one part of me desperate to do something, hating the elements of loss that look like helplessness, dreading the moments when I want to hold Copeland or kiss her cheek and finding no comfort for my anguish other than to stroke the computer screen where her picture serves as my screensaver. This is the same part of me that's ritualistic: wear this bracelet, listen to that song, fold this piece of paper just-so, only to remain connected to her. But there's another kind of grief, the other part, the part that battles the frantic movement. This is the laziness. I have no motivation for anything. I loaf about the house like someone who's - ironically - in a drug-induced state and wonder what I can possibly be entertained by. It's the me that will sit in front of the television set and flip mindlessly through uninspiring, unintelligent programming and read what by all accounts are "trashy" celebrity gossip magazines just to eliminate the possibility of stumbling across my emotions.

My mom is taking me to Texas in a few weeks and I confess, I dread it. I dread going anywhere that, inevitably, Copeland will not be. It sounds strange - as though I'm half expecting to turn a corner someday and see her face. But to go new places and realize, again, that she's not there is only to be reminded, again, that she's not anywhere. She's gone and I can't get to her, at least not yet. I could be bundling her up in cozy blankets for walks over the freshly-fallen leaves, but no, my baby's being cradled in the arms of God. Should I be happy? Maybe. If my faith - what I believe - is absolutely true (and I must believe this if I believe it at all), then Heaven is as real and solid and irrefutable as a math equation. But life isn't numerical or formulaic in the least. Life is neither black or white, but gray, and the swirling mess of it all means I can no more find absolute comfort in the absolute truth of Heaven than I can find in the absolute truth of the Pythagorean theorem. These absolute truths may themselves be, after all, absolute, but I'm a constantly writhing, conflicted individual with hardly anything solid or irrefutable about me. What about any emotion, on this side of Heaven, is absolute for me? It's ironic that I will never know complete comfort until I am completely comforted - until there is no more need for comforting.

Rob Bell wrote a book called "Velvet Elvis" and from the first few pages, I can tell he's going to be very hung up on the idea that we need to shake off the dust of our thinking about God and Jesus and even salvation and the resurrection and, well, everything that means anything to any of us who call ourselves Christians (and that, too, is another word that needs re-examination). Thank goodness. For the shaking off, I mean. When I was fifteen I knew Jesus. But that Jesus looked different than the Jesus I know at 28. Has He changed? Certainly not. But my capacity to see Him has. I knew Him then. Now I just know Him more. And praise God for that fact! For the Jesus I knew before my trials would not have been a comfort to me. If my ideas about Jesus never change then I'm certainly not worshipping God Almighty, but rather a god - a god I can conform and contort to fit into a mold that looks and feels the way I think religion and faith and church and Bible study should look and feel. No, Jesus does not change - He was and is and is to come - but our need for HIm does, and thus we are compelled, we are forced, to see Him differently. Not for what He's become. But for what He's been all along. If the Jesus I knew at fifteen would not have been a comfort to me in my trials, it was only because He hadn't given me any. The depths to which He will take us will only be matched by the depths of His character He longs to reveal.

And so I struggle. I long to see Him, to know Him, to understand this Man who does, in fact, hold my child in His arms. But I also ache for the painless, for the life of ease where there was no need for the knowing. I don't want to be the drug girl. Or the girl who chucks mugs off of porches. And yet I suspect that this is the version of myself that is most real. This is the version which sorrow and suffering has generated. And this is the version of me that Jesus loves. He does not want me to be what I once was or even what I have the potential of becoming. This is the me He wants. And it is all I have to offer.