Vincent van Gogh: It is so clear you cannot help. And when you leave, and everyone always leaves, I will be left once more with an empty heart and no hope.
Eleventh Doctor: My experience is that there is, you know, surprisingly, always hope.
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A couple of years ago I discovered this thing called One Word 365. Basically, the idea is that you select a word for the year to be a kind of focus word, if you will, that you allow to influence and change you mentally/emotionally, physically, or spiritually. For 2015, I chose two words because as much as I tried, I couldn't shake the idea that I needed to embrace both of them -- write and follow. The first one was chosen because I had just come off the 2014 Write 31 Days challenge in October and I wanted to commit myself to writing in my blog more regularly and keeping up with it instead of just throwing it to the side. In the two years that have been since, I've had ups and downs, but I think I've managed to write at least one entry each month and some months, more than one. That may not seem like much, but it's a start. I chose "follow" as a word because I was struggling spiritually with wanting to follow after Christ. I've spent pretty much my entire life following Christ, but had gone through a trauma so severe that it had shaken my faith to the deepest levels. I wanted a reminder of what I had always done and that I knew deep down that I still wanted to do -- follow Him.
For 2016, I kept my 2015 words and added a third -- move. In 2015, I participated in my first ever Out of the Darkness Overnight Walk and struggled physically much more than I wanted to do. After only completing about 1.5 miles of the total 18, I felt defeated and I knew that although I had emotionally been struggling, I wasn't in the physical shape I needed or wanted to be either. I also knew that I needed to lose weight and make some changes to better my health, so I decided that a good first step would be to start moving more. To that end, I joined a local gym so that I could start walking and lifting some weights and in April, I got a Fitbit tracker to help motivate me to take more steps each day. I can't say that I suddenly became a fitness fanatic, but I did get more steps in this year and as a result, I lost a little weight and got in a little better shape. This year I completed 7 miles of the 18 during the Out of the Darkness Overnight walk and that was with the addition of taking a nasty tumble and mildly injuring myself. So although it wasn't a hugely different year with regard to fitness, it was a better year than the one before it and it is the beginning of a journey that I'm going to continue this year.
Speaking of this year, I suppose it's time to tell you about what happened the other night in Pendragon's office. You see, out of deference to how much he knows I've struggled with it, there is a word that he has studiously avoided using for the most part over the last three and a half years. He knows how much this word has caused me anguish and buckets of tears. He knows how many hours I've spent in his office talking around this word, afraid to even breathe it aloud. Because of that, he hasn't pressed me on it, but during our conversation on Thursday, he went out on a limb and said that he felt like the things I've been learning with my psychologist Dr. D have been beneficial and that the fact that I've been able to use those skills is a good reason for hope.
Hope.
I have to be honest. Just typing that scares the heck out of me. I have been scared for almost four years to have hope. It is to the point that in the beginning, I couldn't make myself utter the word aloud, not even in its more common sense (like "I hope you have a great birthday."), much less talk about it in any depth or use the word in its theological sense. A lot of my reluctance to talk about it has come from the fact that part of the theological sense of it has to do with trusting God. For someone who has trusted God her whole life, that ought to be easy, but trauma has a funny way of changing the most fundamental things about a person in ways that he or she never thought possible.
You see, the trauma that I endured and the PTSD that came about as a result of it also created a deep pit of anger within me and a quite a lot of that anger was directed towards God. I felt deserted by Him in my greatest hour of need, despite having cried out to him amidst the ordeal I went through. It was as though He had vanished completely. The silence was deafening and the sense of His presence which had always been so real to me, was gone so completely it was as though I had never felt it at all. The combination of the trauma itself plus feeling so completely abandoned by God shook my faith so much that for a very long time, I wanted nothing to do with God or even anything associated with God in any way. It got so bad that I eventually began to doubt my faith and struggle with the temptation to turn away from God completely.
(Please click here for part 2.)
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