It’s so hard to believe in the good sometimes. Not because I know that it isn’t out there, that I think it isn’t out there, but because I am aware of being swallowed up by emotion. By sadness. By empathy. By emptiness. Is it a sin to be so tenuous in one’s heart?
Beyond the wall of emotion, the clouds of my own consternation, the clouds of my own perplexity, I can see the blue sky, the neverending sphere of God’s mercy. I know that it lays beyond myself. What I need to know is that he sends shafts of that sky to my heart through his Spirit. There is hope.
Do other men feel the chaos, the whelming flood of responsibility and expectation, or am I simply someone without the capacity to handle it in the way that they would? Do they feel the slowness, the doldrums of a heart without hope, without a pursuit?
Damn the TV sets, the evening spent in sloth, the entropic rhythm of suburbia. Let me rather drink life to the lees. But I am not the rebel, the hero, the maverick. I’m a sheep, a weak and lowly one. I need a leader, a shepherd, a warrior to cut a path through the thorns and lead me out of complacent meadows and into the wilderness, the darkness, the endless.