I experience emotional pain very physically. Maybe that's normal, I don't know. I've never been in anyone else's skin to understand how they feel their lives as they happen but I know that the word 'hurt' is so accurate. Pain really hurts me. When I see starving children on my television, when I learn of the death of a friend, my heart literally hurts. Like a little bomb has just exploded in there, leaving bits of me scattered all around, bleeding. I often say, "Ouch, my heart". I know that sounds childish maybe, but its the only word I have. Ouch. That hurts. When I found out that my mom has cancer I spent nearly a week feeling physically ill. It was so real that I even jotted it just so that I would remember it later. "My skin hurts, like the sun is burning me". Hurting skin. Like I my body was trying to escape the covering that traps it in the here and now. Sometimes we long to escape it, to run away. And I've recently been feeling a new pain, more of an heaviness really. Occasionally, out shopping or on the street, at the most unpredictable and inconvenient times, I'll see a beautiful baby, new, tiny, and just the size that you know, if you were to hold her, she would nestle into your chest and feel like she's an extension of you...and my arms will ache. Literally. They physically ache. Ache to hold a little beauty and know that she is mine.
Someone asked me the question recently, "When have you felt most alive, most human?". And, for me, times of pain are often times of feeling most human. Being human hurts. To be human is to be small, to be damaged by sin we do and sin done against us, to be sick and broken...to depend wholly on God. The smaller I feel in my circumstances, the bigger He is in the reality of my day to day. The more I surrender. The more I hope. The more I beg forgiveness. The more I believe. And the more human I become. More fully how He designed me to be. Fully dependent on Him. I hate the pain. But I love how He speaks to me through it.
