Guilt, the unloveliest of places.

Why is this so hard to write about?  I have five saved drafts in my blog archive, none of which I will post... This topic is complicated, vulnerable, and a little... volcanic.

Guilt.  Guilt is a complicated emotion in grief, apparently acutely present in all grief cases... It is so intricately woven in the brokenness of our human relationships, between both rational failures and irrational failures, true expectations and false expectations, honest reflections and erroneous fabrications of the mind...

There is a crushing weight of guilt accompanied with the death of a loved one.

This is something I haven't dealt with well...  I remember so many people saying, You're doing so well!!  I thought to myself... Well? What am I missing? There is no way to do this "well"...

If I was missing something, guilt would be it.  And I very honestly think it has done some damage.  Things have been pretty dark and pretty low, and guilt is an overwhelming and crushing force against life moving forward... It has affected me and assaulted me from many different angles, different sources, different venues.  It has many layers, and there is without a doubt only one source of hope and freedom from this guilt...

Why does guilt always drive us away from the One who can heal it?  I've experienced this.  In all of my comings and goings, looking for a house, putting mine up for sale, making decisions, greatly tiring of people's opinions... Guilt was sneaking up on me, calling in the ranks to keep me surrounded, strategically planning a great attack... Trauma, grief, sorrow and anguish, anger and confusion, apathy and depression... All accumulated into one big massive mess of guilt.  I felt so down I wondered if I had truly lost my faith and had been cut off from the Source of life and hope altogether... Where was He?  But I didn't blame Him.  I was wretched and weak.  I had failed miserably.  I was hopeless.

This was a very dark place.  It was a bottom I wish I had never known.  It was a place where I could imagine why people plotted to end their own life, became alcoholics, desperate to drown out the pain... It certainly wasn't livable, though life remained unchanged on the outside.  It made me think of all the people who've committed suicide, with others saying, I saw them just this morning and they seemed fine!  (I promise I'm not suicidal so please don't freak out.) This was a short period of time for me, but a very profound one I have to write about, and it felt like forever.  I loathed every minute of being in that complicated pit of accumulated guilt (I'm not sure I'm really out of it, yet...) involving everything from not being there with Lynn when he breathed his last, everything I said or didn't say when he was alive, did or didn't do, all the ways I failed him in our ministry life together, and all the ways I feel I am failing him now, walking away from our life together, trying to move forward into something new, trying to let go...

I feel slightly jaded after this plunge into hell, a dark place where God cannot exist.  In essence, guilt is something in which we remove ourselves from His saving grace.  I didn't mean to do it, of course I wasn't removed completely, I was really still right in the palm of His hand... Is it all psychological? Anyway, it happened.  And I am oddly thankful.

I am tremendously thankful for a few reasons... One being, I am not afraid of something I know.  I did not know this place before.  I didn't know what to do with a person suffering there...?  Now, I can sit with them, enter into it with them, without fear, without doubt, and love, and hopefully watch Perfect Love absolve guilt and separation, touching the unloveliest of places...

And, as my friend Chris commented, the anger, guilt, and intensified grief I've been experiencing in the last few weeks (months?) is evidence of my position.  It always gets worse before it gets better, right?  Somehow, I know that I have been plunging East*, and the sun is brimming just beyond the horizon, and soon it will break forth like the noonday sun in glory, and splendor, and beautiful sunshine!!  And I will rest in its warmth, bask in its glow, and heal under its heavenly whispers...

*Plunging East
...Later someone else said to him, the quickest way for anyone to reach the sun and the light of day is not to run west, chasing after the sun, but to head east, plunging into the darkness until one comes to the sunrise. (A Grace Disguised, by Jerry Sittser, p. 42)