A Benediction of Bucketloads

Grief has a way of paralyzing you into a survival stupor. 

That’s what I’ll call it: a survival stupor. 

It isn’t actually stupid (as the name seems to suggest), but it is a trance of sorts, a paralysis, an inability to see. It is an insane hyper focus on breathing in and out, it’s adrenaline and cortisol-hijacked fight or flight, it’s the nervous system’s way of making it through the mine field just one day at a time… sometimes one hour, one minute at a time. 

It is the freezing of time. 

And I’m gonna call it like it is: a survival stupor sucks up all your energy and masks it as a desire to live. 

But can I just say… I’m not sure it is a desire to live. 

It might just be (in my holy and hard-fought experience) … trauma-triggered focus on the tick-tick-tick of the minute-hand. 

Am I still here? 

Do you hear the tick? 

And is it living if you’re only surviving? 

But you can wake up. 

This is the bottom line. 

Fellow survivor, let me whisper to you… 

no, no, no…  let me shout to you above the noise of what has happened to you… 

you CAN wake up. 

It’s not easy, that much is for sure. And I insist: it’s a potion of time, the divine, and hard work (dressed up as counseling and crying and integrating the thing that hurts the most - this is bad news for those of us Type A’s, I see you). It’s foggy as hell the whole damn way, and it turns out that the bottom is actually right-side up. 

But don’t give up, dear one. 

You can clear your glasses from the fogged up view of the minute-hand and see once more, experience once more the beauty of this life that lies outside the scope of mere survival. 

This is what I want for me and it’s what I desire most for you, my comrade in trauma and loss. 

To see, to really see ::: the great big, grand, dazzling world before us, 

And to want to live — to want to take it all in and to soak up every messy and glorious bit of it. 

I want hunger for us, thirst for us: 

That we wouldn’t be satisfied with the mere crumbs of the minute-hand and scraps from the table of survival. 

I want our bellies to roar, to join in the grumble of all of creation — that knows that the Kingdom that is both here and now and still yet to come — only gets tasted by those who participate in it — not as a spectator sport, but as bloodied warriors feasting in gardens and hanging from vines and growing wildly colorful plants and cooking up flavors of every variety. 

I don’t want paralysis for us. 

I want life, in bucketloads. 

Grief has already taken from me. Let it not also take this one, precious life I still have yet to live. 

It has already taken from you too. Let it not also take your one, precious life you still have yet to live too. 

Let the minute-hand come for us, and find us drenched in joy, rolling in belly laughter and elbow-deep in Kingdom shenanigans participating fully in the conspiracy of New Creation so that all and everything may one day be free and flourishing, including, my dearest, you and me. 

We cannot take away what has happened.
It has sucked and it has been cruel and it has changed us. 

But it doesn’t get to own us. 

Let our loud living be our defiance.  

Here’s to bucketloads.