The brightness of the leaves bursting color are humbling, after all of the complaining I have been doing, this year. October has taken on a redness I don't think I have seen yet, thus far. Something having to do with the elements over last winter in all its brutality has bestowed it, I hear.
I have been starting to glean some things recently. Most pertinently, that I have survived something, plain and simple. The details are less important than what they amount to which is the reality of injustice, and still I am not a saint for survival, even if I tend to turn survivors into saints. In all reality my eyes have not seen the worst, and no amount of psychological distance, geographic gymnastics, self-soothing, distraction, denial, time, or even prayer, can take away the pain of knowing that in this world people go through these monstrosities everyday, in great numbers and on vastly higher scales.
Death has a way of slapping you in the face, insulting your intelligence, and in case you have any arrogance left when it is through with you, it dares you to grieve without turning away from a God who sees. Hagar called him "El Roi." I can say without reservation, that I would have been counted among the scores who have lost hope, not seeing the goodness of the Lord, as that ever important clause in the Psalm goes, "in the land of the living."
The mercy in pain is not something I can really comprehend, much less communicate very well. This past year I might have spent some time in the belly of a whale, I was so bitter, but I am coming to realize, that the redemption of my own story is not the point. Jesus said he came to heal the broken-hearted, that by his stripes we are healed and that was my hope when I left Mormonism. It wasn't about whether or not Joseph Smith was a heretic, or even how wonderful it was to stop standing on my elbows for an apple, trying to make circles into squares. Death- was overcome. If that isn't hope I don't know what is, and I don't ever want to lose sight of that again.
