Digging deep is exhausting. Ransacking one’s own heart to get to the core of the pain is not something for the faint of heart.

If I listen to the voices in my head, I am the faint of heart. Yet tonight, and for many many nights over the last two years, I dug deep. I found the pain. And I found it’s source. An elephant sat on my chest and I couldn’t breathe.

I came home and sat in the silence of the night, alternately writing and crying, sometimes both. My journal is filled with tear-stained pages.

Larry seems to be having a similar night as me.

"It’s interesting that God didn’t get angry, as my repeated implications
of nefarious activity in my life might have produced in another. He
knows that what’s really going on is the desperate hope of a very
scared child who has always had to fight for room in which to breathe.
I’ll even fight God for that. Too scared to hope that anything good
could be real, too badly hurt to want to be hurt again, so kill off the
hope and drive God away so that His offers of hope don’t tempt me away
from safety."

Tonight I heard a description of myself that sounded so beautiful; resilient, courageous, gentle, compassionate… I just wish I believed it were true. The mirror I look in shows me a far uglier picture.

So I sat in the stillness, writing on the wet pages of my journal. God sat down beside me and we cried together. I’d forgotten how good that feels. So much time running from myself. So little time sitting in the stillness, letting God drench me.

I know I have come a long way on this journey of healing, health and wholeness. But days like today remind me just how far I have yet to go. Could it be possible that the most painful and difficult of this path lies just ahead, in this very realm of learning to love myself?