Coming into the New Year, it felt like I finally was moving forward in some things in my life. Now that January is closing down, I feel back to where I was before, frustrated and confused and tired and unfocused.

After finally shaking a month long cold to begin this year, another one has made a home within me this weekend. I try to exercise. I try to eat fairly healthy. I try to rest. And I can’t seem to get back to 100%. I wish I could figure that out.

For whatever reason, I know I am irrelevant in the girl’s life, and I still pretend to think she might somehow miraculously have a change of heart and a change of vision, and finally see me. But I need to accept for a final time that she will not, and move on. I am foolish. I cling too long to things I love and want- even if the possibilities of having that thing are none. Life is moving on. Time is moving on. And I don’t move on with it.

And then there are all the things I am involved with now. Why. Why am I doing all of these things? To fill time? To avoid aloneness? Why? Church has been a good place to be and grow, but I am feeling burnt out a bit. I feel like the small group is struggling, and that I am just not a good leader in it. Lots of people with whom I started the church have moved on now. Why. Why did they move on?

I feel like I am marooned on a log in the river that is moving in the opposite direction of everyone else I know and care about.

I feel a little like I am sinking.

And our kiddo basketball team is now 0-3, and I have a quiet fear that my penchant for losing is being passed on into this team I help with.

And I can’t think clearly enough to write.

I am frustrated. I am struggling with focus. I am tired.

I understand how Forrest Gump might have felt after running for months all across and around America, when he says “I’m done now. I’m gonna go home.”

Lord, grant me the grace to see it all in perspective, and to continue to fight for the things that are important to me and that I need and that I love.

And to trust that You continue to love me, and that things will break right for me somewhere, at some point in time up ahead. I am tried of feeling the losing.

Ahh, Life, don’t go on too far without me. I fear losing my grip, and from you, being left behind.

—

In the spring, when the rain came down like a river from the sky, he went to her and pledged, “One day, I will carry you away. I will carry you away on the sea, to a land of light and warmth- just wait for me.”

“I will wait” she exclaimed, with a bow in her hair and a string on her finger, wound three times tightly as a promise. “I will wait for the day when your boat is ready and the winds call and you come for me. I will wait for you, my love.”

And so he went down in the valley, to the mines, to work, and she stayed with her aunt in the tiny town, darning, waiting for the rain to end.

“He will come soon”, she told herself, day by day. “My love will come to fetch me and to carry me away in his arms.”

But spring rolled to summer, and sumer to fall, and after a year and another, he did not call.

“I will wait” she said, with a bow in her hair, above a heavy heart and a sorrowful stare.

“I will wait.”