Point of No Return

My body has slowed down the last several weeks. To observant outsiders (those not privy to the relentless cog-grinding inside my head), I've become quiet, tired, and resigned. Resigned to what, I am not sure. Even today, I fought valiantly to stay awake in church, but slipped out early from the potluck to come home and try to study for a upcoming certification exam. The text lies beside me on the couch, unopened, as I write. When I work, I struggle to be on my feet for my 13 hour shift, and collapse into bed immediately upon getting home, sometimes not even eating dinner. I have four alarms set on my phone, each twelve minutes apart, just in case I sleep though the first two or three.

Part of me is sucked dry, dry as a sun-bleached bone. Perhaps it is physical--I won't hear back on the biopsy until next week. Maybe it's mental: I always become introspective during the last weeks of the year--is it a mild SAD? Or just the melancholy season? Or the time for old, wearisome burdens to return to my mind once summer's cavalier days are gone? I am not sure. But I suspect this tiredness is more than that. I think I've plodded far enough along the path to have come suddenly to a precipice, that Point of No Return, but I haven't the energy to take the leap--partly because I don't know which direction to hurl myself with that last summoning of strength. So instead, I sit on the ledge, dangle my feet over it, and wait. I can't go back down the road (things can never be as they were before), but to go on requires more than I have.

That's the trouble with learning--you simply can't un-learn something. You can always choose to walk away, turn a blind eye and a deaf ear, stuff it down into an obscure corner of your soul, but you cannot ever be without that knowledge. Sometimes, ignorance really is bliss, for the more one learns, the harsher--and more strangely beautiful--the world becomes. There are several pressing things I have learned this year, things that demand my attention, contemplation, and decisions. Some have deadlines. Some ought to have deadlines. I would share them all with you if I could, ask for a round of votes, and then all would be settled. If only it were that simple.

Everything I want to do, I yearn to do, I cannot do because what I am currently doing prevents me from doing that which I so greatly desire to do. And yet I hesitate to throw my entire situation to the wind, because as much as there is a vagabond soul in me that chafes at the reins, I am my mother's daughter, and her pragmatic blood in my veins holds me back, politely pointing out what a terribly imprudent thing it would be to throw it all away--just yet, anyway.

There is a part of me that loves what I do--bringing new souls into the world, day after day, hearing the same little first gasping cries and the little galloping heartbeats surge into life outside the womb. Hours--sometimes days--of exhausting laboring, ended in a single moment when the world's focus narrows and slows to just that place, just that moment, when women from every walk of life experience that very primal thing, birth. But there are things about it that I do not love, things that constrain me, things I know are not all right, not natural, not as they should be. I will never really belong here either, it seems.

In short, life from my vantage point is a bit tenuous these days. Settled in a routine for now, perhaps until the spring, who knows. Not permanent, not by any means. I hesitate to make friendships and put down roots in my new place, because it feels so temporary. But the old life back at home isn't enough to sustain me in the meager portions I am allowed. I sometimes wish I could go back, a year, five years, to be that happy girl whose problems consisted mainly of getting her chores done and deciding what to wear to youth group. To be seventeen again and pick a different route, one that didn't end quite in this exact place...

I'm ungrateful, I know, when I'm in these moods. How very merciful and generous God has been to me, has given me far more than millions of people will ever have. Compared to the world at large, I live in the lap of luxury. But perhaps it is this sense of privilege that compels me to want to do more, to be useful, to actually care and take action, yet I do not know how. It is rather unpleasant, to be here at this Point of No Return, and yet have no immediate place to go. For the first time in my charmed life thus far, I understand what frustration is--frustration that is compounded by ambiguity. If I knew what the matter was, I would at least have a nicely defined problem to work on. But this frustration of mine has nowhere to land, nothing to explain it, and it makes the burden dig a bit more sharply into my shoulders, and makes those who love me turn a quizzical brow when I cannot even define it, and thus end up sweeping the whole thing away with, "Never mind, I'm fine, really, I'm quite fine. Quite, quite fine..."

It will pass. It always does. I am comforted and strengthened by the words of those who've lived in eras before me, yet knew precisely what it is that nags at me. Their pens preserved their insights for generations to come--namely, me. I'm grateful. Lewis, Tozer, Spurgeon, Chambers, the Puritans. They unpack human frailty to remind me I am not alone, nor is this a dead-end in some spiritual maze, but rather a quiet place of uncomfortable transformation--it reminds me of cutting across the ravine to my grandparents' house when I was young, rather than taking the well-trod trail over the bridge with the adults. The ravine was neck-high with blackberries and hawthorns (sometimes their tenacious tendrils caught me and made me bleed), and about halfway up the hill on the other side, I would begin to wish that I had gone along with everyone else. But turning back and retracing my steps would bring more pain than was left ahead of me if I just surged forward. It hurt, but I always arrived at the place I was meant to be.

"Remember, the clouds are a sign that He is there." --Oswald Chambers, My Utmost for His Highest