Butterfly Chronicles Volume 49: Peter MD, Faith, Lies, and Butterflies

"...after the fire a still small voice."

Grief sucks.  Grief, a man chasing the “horizon – round and round they sped.”  Heart holes bigger, not better.  

Peter MD, “expert” and those cited “experts,” I spout shut-up at all of them.  Grief doesn’t live at your address, suicide isn’t your house number.  Until you walk down my street, don’t tell me what NOT to do.  Isolation, says Peter MD and those “experts,” is unhealthy.  Shut-up.  Isolation is a friend, a cloak of armor guarding others from me as much as it protects me from them.  Does anyone REALLY want to hear the craptastic grief talk?  I wouldn’t, couldn’t.  I couldn’t handle it – someone else’s grief.  No funeral homes or gravesides or hearses for me right now, and never would be too soon.

 

Does any audience really want to hear or know what this is like, and the answer is no.

Peter MD, I said, it’s not like you’d be bar-sitting, sipping an aged scotch listening to the aching, seeping sap of grief crap for free…you do it for money;  you wouldn’t do it for free.  Chuckled, he certainly did, that MD Peter.

So, I told him my lies.  Lies maybe I shouldn’t tell here in these words.  The lies are - that on this street -I’m not telling the truly true truth.  Repeating faith words, I have no faith.

MD shoves back and challenges me– the enemy lies he says.

I shoot back, I don’t want to give up my guilt and grief and pain or give it to God or give in to forgiveness, or even give in to believing I’m forgiven.  All I feel is fault and failure.  And I know this is wrong, but I don’t even care.

Lies.  I’ve told out loud what I believe intellectually, but mine is a dead heart without heart conviction.  I don’t know if Truth is true anymore.

Peter interjection (ho hum I think) – Mr. Peter MD, he goes on and on, it’s not a feeling; Faith is not a feeling.  Faith, he says, is doing it, saying it, singing it, worshiping it, living it – especially in the deepest, darkest, most dangerous doubting.

Maybe so, MD.  But in the hidden places of a black heart, I spit at God.  Why?  Why? Not only about Zach, but why’s about all of us.  Why would You do this to anyone – us?  Guilt for Zach, spitting at God for a father alone now, no guy adventuring, a dad’s eyes sad glassed.  A sister who can’t sit in the quiet, calm life, or the missing Zach blankets her all sticky hot.  A sister who seems sure and fine about Zach’s heaven life, but we wait for a day for that dam to break – the grief gush – will it come or will it not – waiting.  There's so much guilt all piled up on top of all those what-if's and why's and why's and what-if's.

Like a heroin addict, I go back and back for the guilt, the why’s, the doubts, basking in the self absorption of pain, rolling like a dog on death, my pride refusing to bow to Truth.  Lies – the lie that I believe in Zach’s where; Lies that any of that Truth stuff is a comfort or peace or a bandage slowing the grief flow.

MD speaks – That’s faith.  When you keep on moving when it doesn’t make sense, or  when you doubt, or when you don’t even believe that you believe, and you keep moving - that’s faith.  It’s doing those things even when you can’t SEE the Truth.

I’m just hard enough, I say, from the younger life of living mistakes – scarred and dirty and living with a life I regret and mistakes that still burn so many years later - I’m just hard enough and hard headed enough to make it - even depressed.  I so get why people don’t make it though. 

 My toes hang over the failure cliff always wishing the jump.  Some days I know I won’t make it.  Whispers.  That Alpha Omega, the I AM whispers:  selfish.  Others need you to make it so they can make it and they'll make it so you can make it.  Don’t rip the beginning scab that I’ll grow over each of you in My time. No jumping.  Lies.  I don’t believe Him, but I keep writing those verses and reading those verses, finding truth even when I don’t believe it’s true, and I don’t jump.

Grief is full of lies.  Enemy lies.  Heart lies.  Faith lies.  God will have to separate the lies and true Truth and Peter MD says faith means we keep going.

And the God who made me and knit me together in the womb keeps whispering. "Stop fighting a fight that's already been won." Keep going.  Keep going.  Keep going.  True Truth in the middle of all those lies. 

Grief sucks.  It’s hard.  It’s almost a year, and I’m counting the last moments of my son’s life and seeing him in them and missing him so hard I’m broken into uncountable pieces; I'm invisible.

It just SUCKS, and He whispers, a still small voice, and He asks me what I am doing here, and I try to remember the Truth.