The Silence of Suffering

I met God, turned away from God, ran away from God, got chased by God, got caught by God, got hugged by God, all while I kicked and screamed, and I finally melted into God’s embrace in the silence of my suffering. 

That was more my story. It wasn’t pretty. It isn’t pretty. I have to re-learn to trust God during this time. I may, for the first time ever, be learning how to hand something to Him. I am still learning how to not pull that thing back every second of the day. I am learning to pray differently, to worship differently, to seek Him differently. I am both more intentional and also more distracted than ever. But I have met Him here in the suffering. I desire to be with Him more than I desire to be anywhere else. I want Him in my space, my relationships, my decisions. I still resist all of that as well, especially the decision making. I still want my decisions to be my own.

It’s interesting to be on my own for the first time ever, not having to consider anyone for the first time and yet, I am learning for the first time to put God in my decisions but I am struggling to hear Him in the way I thought he used to speak to me. 

Right after the breakup, I was crying all the time. Thoughts consumed me. I felt so unlike myself. I am normally a steady person: my emotions are not all over the place as a general rule. I do not have a lot of ebbs and flows with my emotions, at least outwardly. But with this, I was very emotional and the other thing I was: selfish. I was so selfish. 

I remember sitting at my parents dinner table, picking at a meal they had made me, and they were talking about a friend of theirs and something bad that had happened to them and I remember how not-present I was. I remember thinking, and being serious, how rude it was that they were talking to me about someone else and something else that was going on. Did they not see me dying? And I knew I was being ridiculous, but my pain was so fresh, so all consuming, I could not understand how it didn’t consume them too. 

I know, from previous pains, that one of the best things you can do when in pain is step outside of yourself…help someone else, listen to someone else, give back somehow. I knew this but I could not bring myself to care about anyone else but myself. Pain was all I saw. All I was.

I committed to myself that I would feel the pain, that I wouldn’t numb it with anything: drinking, shopping, CBD, working out, avoiding, etc. I kept a routine and did all the healthy things but I didn’t numb it. I felt it and it was all that I felt. For a long time, all I felt was anxiety and pain and tears and anger. 

And that was all I had the capacity for. I was showing up everyday for the pain inside of me and I could not show up for the pain inside of others. I could not hold space for anyone or anything else. 

As I found God in the silence of my suffering, I slowly learned to see beyond my pain. I began to feel empathy for others again. I began to step out of my selfishness. And so while I have always known that part of moving through pain more quickly is to step outside of yourself, there was a time where I couldn’t and I think that’s okay. I do not like how selfish I was then, how I ignored the story my parents were telling me, how I couldn’t listen to what they were telling me about another person in pain, but I believe that God had to silence everything else for me, and I mean everything else, so I could feel the pain, not numb it, and really suffer with it so that he could break the chain and I could leave it behind. A time of great pain for a shorter period of time over a chain that continues to only allow me to take two steps forward before I come to a halt.