that thursday

I've been sitting here quietly, staring down those words she said, holding them at arm's length. I circle them suspiciously. I simultaneously dread them and long for them. I put them in my mouth, wanting both to spit them out and to ingest them. In truth, they scare me.

So here I am. Sitting across from the truth, holding the raw shredded heart tissue that found its way out of me that day. It had been in hiding so long, protected behind thick steel doors, secured with locks that had long been rusted over.

But now it is here in the light of day, demanding a reckoning. I hold it in my hands, and it's a terrible mess. It's pulpy and tattered and dripping. I can't put it back together. I can't bring any sense or semblance of meaning out of it. There's a reason it remained hidden for so long.

By now most of you have a sense of something happening for both Christianne and I on a day we've both come to call "that Thursday". On that Thursday we were together, we were both startled to the core. For completely different reasons, we saw separate truths emerge that had been hidden and stuffed within us, crammed into dusty corners of forgetting without any conscious knowledge on our parts that they were about to make themselves known.

Christianne has written about beginning the journey deeper into what God revealed to her that day; and now I am doing the same.

I don't want to go there.

Going there means revisiting old wounds, splitting open old scar tissue and permitting God to poke about my insides.

It means resurrecting the memories of relationships long past, bringing to the surface that which I had gagged, bound, weighted with lead, and made to drown. It means not merely being present for the autopsy, but wielding the knife that will open these dead things.

It means looking at the past fifteen years of my life and relationships through a microscope. It means identifying where and how the seedlings of lies were planted, watered, and permitted to grow.

It means putting my finger on sore oozing places and letting God do the same.

It means identifying the lies that have tangled their long, sinewy roots around and throughout my insides, roots that have firmly embedded themselves in my flesh. It means acknowledging that I have held on to them as much as they have held on to me. It means asking God to pull these out by the roots.

It will mean learning to believe the truth.

The truth: the truth of those words that she prayed over me. The words that I keep at a distance, staring them down and eyeing surreptitiously. The words that I walk circles around to examine from every angle, looking for leaks, cracks, flaws, exceptions. Words that are foreign to my heart, that feel like rocks in my mouth. These words I must learn to believe.

And so I fear what is being asked of me: of being called again to walk a path that is dark, where my feet are the only ones that can do the walking.