Kick at the Darkness

I woke at 3:30.  Blogged yesterday's daily 5 sometime around 4.  At 5 I rolled over again to stare at the clock, and wondering when the night would come to an end, or sleep would finally return.

In the darkness, all of the rational things that help during the day seem to lose power.  I lay there, panicking, exhausted, feeling helpless, praying desperately.

Somewhere in the midst of the night, a Bruce Cockburn lyric I've often heard quoted returned to me "Got to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight."

That's what last night felt like.

Somewhere around dawn I drifted off for a few more hours of restless sleep.

I googled the lyric this morning, and it seems apt, especially when you add the line just before it:

Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight
Got to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

Maybe that lyric returning to me was the whisper of God.  I don't know.  But it helps a little.

Because I lay there frustrated and angry that I was feeling the way I was.  It's been months since I've had a panic episode like this, and I was beginning to be able to believe that they were a thing of the past.  I still pray that one day they will.  That like the depression I struggled with for so many years, there will be healing.

It reminds me, in some ways, that line about kicking at the darkness of the phrase from scripture that played over and over in my head the day I was healed from depression a little over four years ago.  That phrase involved kicking too.  And the image it conjured was one of scarred and bloody feet, but not scars that were fresh - scars that were healing.  There is so much more to that moment, and that story.  It can be shared another time.  But the simple conjuring of that memory by a piece of lyric in the middle of the night was somehow hopeful.  Hopeful that this too can end.

"Nothing worth having comes without some kind of fight."

At three and four and five this morning it felt like a fight that would never end.  And really, it hasn't yet.  But daylight is here, and there is some respite in that.  Time to regroup, to remind myself again of truths.  To push back the darkness that overwhelms and entangles, and grab onto truth and light.  To trust that Jesus will somehow bring peace again.