I was a week past deadline on this post.
I sat at the keyboard for two days straight while fever swallowed up my hours and I mopped up my nose with a growing pile of tissues, gathering like soggy clouds in my wastebasket. And my fingers hovered over the keys. Backspace gobbled up my words faster than I could get them down and I must have started five or six posts before the letters trailed off and got stringy and anemic like my story was being siphoned off and stolen away. I wanted to blame it on the flu, because who can think clearly and write in a cohesive way when you’re fighting off tiny viruses, but I knew it was more than that. I knew I was fighting more than my body in trying to write this post.
I messaged Kris and told her I was trying, I asked for direction and she offered prayer and so much grace. I reached out to some writer friends who get the struggle to nail down words during hard seasons. Who understand the work it is to show up and say something and the sheer joy it is to produce anything we’re proud of because so often the battle to get to the blank screen means wiping the slate of all the better things we’ve already read by writers who seem to have killed their demons and slayed their obstacles and are rat-a-tat-tapping out their life’s work to their receptive audience of faithful readers.
And I was struggling, folks.
I am the girl who struggles. Flails about, really. Maybe we all do in some way or another, I used to be so much better at hiding it. But I’ve been particularly humbled during this failing season, full of health problems, and mental illness, and life stresses. Hiding it doesn’t really work anymore.
This resonated with me. I have asked God why He made me so emotionally fragile as I watch my friends ‘do’ in spite of their own hardships while I just ‘am’. I think that ‘they’ deserve a spot next to Him at the table, while I just want to remain hidden but still watch and listen to His voice.
Sita, thank you for coming and sharing and taking your rightful place at the table because God sees you and knows you and made you with great purpose to belong to Him. And the gospel allows for this, nothing added, nothing more, just grace upon grace in His presence, a place at the table where it is finished. We can’t add a single thing to what God has done for us and so we can come just as we are and find peace. I hope you keep listening because His word says to “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.” I didn’t feel it either and I doubt all the time that it could really really mean me too, but it does. It does. It means us too.