Words For the Failing Heart

There comes a time when you have to move towards finding the door that leads to freedom. Some relationships build you up and nourish you while others slowly eat away at you, exhausting you emotionally, and draining you. The person you were at the beginning of the union somehow has disappeared, and everything you vowed to never become is staring at you from the opposite side of the mirror. Advice once freely given to help someone who felt immobilized in their circumstances is no longer foreign but welcomed.

 Hard, cold splashes of water awake you as if stuck in a dream, looking at yourself in the corner of the ring. You sit there, gasping for air, breathing desperately from the running, the jumping around, and dodging hits. Every heartbeat getting wilder for you know that the bell will soon be rung and time has rung out. Uncaring hands violently grab at you, yelling and demanding you go back into the ring and give it your all.  “Push through one more round,” you tell yourself, “Try to keep your balance. Don’t fall. Hold on. It will be over soon.” That voice within you begins to speak lies that you’ve allowed to become truth.

 No matter how desperately you fight to win, you have already lost. Somewhere in the reservoirs of who you were, you decide to allow defeat to take over. Eyes closed and standing still, you allow the knockout to come upon you so that you can fall. You need to fall. Life has made you so tired that one more knockout is only a welcomed gift that offers a moment of relief, to escape the pain of having to stand through one more fight, one more misunderstanding, and one more reminder that there is nothing left of who you used to be, so why hold on any longer.

You know that you need to change your situation, when you spend most of your days finding your “happy place” in order to become invisible in your “real place”. That real place is a constant battle arena where your convictions are questioned, your morale is picked on, and your mind is carefully broken into a billion pieces of data trying to understand what has happened and no matter how hard you think, the answers don’t come. Oh, how we change!

How we surrender with the idea that somehow by holding on, the change will come. We believe that every prayer will be answered if we are faithful and allow ourselves to be dissolved in the process. Our self-identity is corrupted. The fire once burning in our hearts to live and dream big has become smoke. The fire has slowly been put out from years of standing under showers of lies and disillusion. You look at your life and compare the remaining breaths as mere words written on paper, to discover you made a mistake, then it is crumpled and tossed into the nearest garbage can.

Oh that this heart were an eagle, able to soar up and beyond the mountains of despair. If this soul could only swim away into the ocean and find an island of escape and repose. What sadness. You forgot how to swim and feel yourself releasing your last breath as you drown into the middle of all your broken dreams and emptiness. Emptiness. You have nothing to show for all your hard work. There are only piles of debt reaching out at you from inside the circumference of your life. Piles of regret and hopelessness.

“Open the door!” says one voice. “Run! Run fast and don’t look back!”

“Go! But go now before the others convince you change is finally coming!” says another.  But you know better. You’ve been here before.

“You’ll be alone. Everyone will blame you, again and again. They will say it was your fault, again.”

“My fault.” You start to repeat. “My fault. Yes. Maybe it is my fault for being here. I’ve either allowed it to go on too long or I didn’t really do anything about removing myself from this situation.”

Dear desperate soul that can no longer feel the sting of the accuser, heart that has become more dead than alive, spirit that walks among the living but is really dead, look into the eyes of Life one more time and decide. 

Do not decide for them. Do not decide for what you thought you had. Don’t decide for what you imagined could happen if things changed. Decide for you. For you and no one else. Decide for your heart. Decide for your mind. Decide for your spirit. For when you do, you will have found the door that leads to freedom, and you will close it behind you, throw the key into the abyss behind you, and never look back again.

Run, even as your lungs begin to burn, run until you find the place of refuge in the arms of True Love, Blessed Assurance, and Redemption. Run into the embrace of One that will never tire of you.