It’s been a weird week this week as I can see I am sliding into another pool of sadness. I think I deal with this each year around the holidays because I feel a strong sense of being alone during this month and some. Today the melancholy is registering more tangibly. I know some of the mood is due to my own darkened thinking, and some of it is due to reality. I try to get a grip on the former, but the realities of the latter hang around.

I haven’t felt physically well for probably half a year, but a lingering cold over the last month has really sapped me. That has me tired.

A friendship/relationship that brought a lot of excitement and charge to my life over the last month is fading, and that is due partly to the consequences of decisions made within it, as well as just a recognition that we’re at two different places in life, and also to what I believe is my inadequacy and a sense that I am just not a fun person to hang with day-by-day, feeling I don’t have much to bring to the table in the friendship. I am troubled at my inability to develop and sustain deeper relationships with most women, and I recognize this is a consequence of some pretty fractured places inside my heart. Still, I am feeling this loss to some extent as a replay of other similar losses I have faced at varying levels in the past, and yet it is tinged with the knowledge that this friendship has some ties to life and a friendship borne long ago. I feel like a deep failure in relationships. I continue to struggle knowing what love looks like from others, particularly in relationships with women. Someone may very well love me and tell me so, and yet for reasons that are beyond me, it does not register as real unless some experience affirms it. And I am also bothered that I am more concerned about whether I can tell if I am loved or not than I am just about loving people around me. Worrying about being loved is the behavior of a hungry heart. I guess my heart has some continuing work to do.

Also, my brother is leaving the state tomorrow for Wisconsin with my dad and my nephew, to find a place for his family to call home. In another month, his family will join him, and there will be a permanent vacuum here in Albuquerque with the fact they are gone. Granted, we have not just hung out regularly while he and his family have lived here, but the geographical reality of their distance hammers home that the option to just get together and visit in the future will be pretty severely limited.

I am tired much of the time and just feel stagnation ruling over my life right now. My heart is not completely right with the Lord, which I know is some of the funkiness, but much of the rest of the mood comes from a recurring sense of drift in my life. I am not moving toward much of anything. I am not super excited by anything. Rather, I find myself regularly pinged within by reflections on losses, lost opportunities, and lost friendships, and consequently, greeted with a desire to just shut down and pull away from everyone and everything. I know I cannot do this, or cannot afford to do this, but the impulse is there- flight from inner ache.

It’s a good time to put one’s full weight on God’s grace, I guess. It’s a time to try and listen to God’s Word within, to let go of what you cannot control, to not listen to the lies and crap that I often let flow through my mind, and it’s a good time to just re-admit I am dependent on Him for life and for spiritual fullness. It’s a good time to strive to rest in Him. I know this is what He wants from His wayfaring children.

It is also a time to guard against self-pity and depression. The only route out of loneliness and a sense of unlovability is to throw the garbage thoughts and feelings aside, dive into the warmth of God’s grace, and love whoever you are around.

Lord, help me to rest in You, and trust where You are taking me. Help me to get outside of myself, and to love others around me. Including myself.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.
~ 2 Corinthians 12:9