Somehow hope

It's Monday again, and I'm struggling.

I'm feeling lonely.  A bit isolated.

Wondering about the state of a relationship that is precious.  Telling myself that I'm just being neurotic.  And then going on with the neuroses, seemingly unable to halt them.

I'm missing my roommate.  I process best aloud, talking with someone who I know is safe, and she was great for just letting me talk, get the crazy events of my "i work in a soap opera" days off my chest, so that they could dissipate and I could breathe again.

These days I live with Grandma, where every thought needs to be filtered, because any information she garners, she can and will share with everyone you know.

Let's just say that verbal processing isn't so much an option right now.

At least not at home.

Home.

That's a whole other topic.

The room looks like it's mine now.  I've unpacked most of my things.  I put together the "altar" spaces yesterday, unwrapping all the little items from their boxes and arranging them across the surfaces.

But it doesn't feel like home, and I wonder if it ever will.

If it will ever be anything other than "Grandma's basement".

If it will feel safe.

My happiest moment of the weekend was just before coming fully to conciousness this morning, when, just for a moment, I lay there and thought I was in the bedroom in my last apartment.

I watch for that apartment each morning as I go past it on the bus.

That was a happy place for me.  A place of healing.  A home.

And now God has led me elsewhere, and I'm struggling to be at peace with that.

It's not a particularly unique struggle, but right now it is consuming my days, my thoughts.

I find myself longing for something else.  Feeling unsettled, and "inbetween."

If I think about it too long, the tears build behind my eyes and I wonder if I will survive this latest step.

This move from a place that was healing to this whole other painful, awkward place.

Ironic that it is taking place during Lent.

The first Lent in several years where I am struggling too, to find my footing.  Not fasting in any of the traditional ways.  Forgetting at least three times a week to pick up the Lenten reading books I'd committed to using, and then guiltily "catching up" the following day, usually while I lean against the counter in the  tiny basement bathroom, waiting for the toilet to stop running, in case it doesn't stop and I need to take the lid off the tank and mess with things to make it stop.

It's Monday morning, and mostly, I want to cry.  Because my heart hurts.

And then I want to whine a little, too.  Because while I trust that God is in these places, too, they make me antsy and uncomfortable.  They hurt, and I don't like them.

So I listen, over and over, on repeat to Anis Mojgani's Shake the Dust.  Because the human heart beats a hundred thousand times a day.  And somehow that is hopeful.

And I ponder over and over these lines from Richard Rohr "Memory creates a readiness for salvation, an emptiness to receive love and a fullness to enjoy it. Strangely enough, it seems so much easier to remember the hurts, the failures and the rejections. It is much more common to gather our life energy around a hurt than a joy, for some sad reason. Remember the good things even more strongly than the bad, but learn from both. And most of all, “remember that you are remembered by God.”

Because I am remembered by God.  And there is hope in that too.  Even in the moments when I don't like what He is doing, I am remembered by him.

And because, in the absence of someone with whom I can process aloud, I can show up here, and write out my thoughts, and talk myself into somehow hoping, just for a little bit longer.