I’ve got a couple of things for today. One is my own poetry, the other is one from G.K. Chesterton.
Taking courage to continue on against our foes is always a choice between giving up and pressing on.
Back in September 1996 every thing I’d ever cared about, my whole life it seemed, had been lost. The suicide I contemplated was the kind where you give up, and give in to what my critics were saying about me. Aka my exwife and her parents LOL
It’s like a suit of clothes laid out by them, laying on the bed in my hotel room. They leave me no room to prove myself otherwise. They’ve already made up their mind about me, and written me off.
I look in the mirror and see me, blearily, vaguely, fading.
But I take their clothes, and I leave them there on the bed, and check out of that Hotel. I walk around in my own clothes, and be the me I know I am.
But in the case of my divorce there was more to it. My exwife had given up on the dream of her and I. Given up on me. Cut me loose. I was a dangling weight below her as she clamoured up to the peak of her hopes and dreams. This is her paradigm I’m describing, but it’s where hers and mine intersected. I looked over at her, and she’s cutting the tie, she’s checking out! She looked down at me and all she saw was dead weight, took out her very sharp knife, and cut me loose. She watched and saw me plunge into the darkness of the depths of oblivion.
But that was her paradigm.
Yes, she’d beaten me. I was out of the house, laying on a foam mattress, in a spare room of my brother Andrew’s apartment.
I cried myself to sleep every night, and cried until I went to work in the afternoon. I cried through my whole shift.
But then she allowed me to come pick up the kids for a visit. I took them out to go bowling. With them I felt all that emptiness gone. I had no feelings for her. They were and are heart of my heart. I knew that evening where the fight was, and what it was all about. To stay in the lives of my children.
There was an obvious battle to be won. But there was also a less obvious one. A still small voice in my heart bid me to carry on and make myself ready for when they would be mine once again. I didn’t know it at that moment, but it was a call to become all I could be. Financially, mentally, emotionally, spiritually.
Be ready for them. That first step did not have all the others there for me to have a look over like so many points on a bullet list. It was a single line at the top of a blank page. But I knew it was absolutely the true and right thing to do.
Setting out on such a mission is then likened to a march to battle, along the way are doubts. In the midst of that, I found myself at the back of a community church, weeping. All around me were others praying. I took out a pen, and wrote on the back of that day’s bulletin. As I wrote I wept some more. A lady who was going around and praying for others, asked me what she could pray for on my behalf. I gave her what I’d written, she looked overwhelmed.
This morning as I was looking for that to upload to my blog here, I came across this poem by Chesterton.
He accesses the one aspect of Suicide that is the most puzzling. The thought comes partly from having our mind too much on what others are thinking. But we don’t know what others are thinking. It also comes from the SHOULDs and OUGHTs that we allow ourselves to be haunted with.
This is where we can reach out to God as we understand him I that moment, and put in his hands what we cannot deal with or handle in this moment of time.
Then it was my longing to not lose my children. Now it’s the constant doubt about how much time I have left before I pass away.
I guess it’s about time I deal with my fear of death. I think my life long hypochondria is my buried fear, is that repressed or suppressed? 🤔 As unconscious fear, it manifested itself as imagined illnesses and ailments. As a conscious fear it manifests itself in the courage to do battle, by marching forward, and filling my days with all things that fall into my hand to do.
Running Down Vimy 