Death Did Come...

 ... though for me, I know not precisely when.  

I awoke this morning, thinking about the piano.  

The piano, of all things.  

As I laid in bed, I felt God leading me back to what truly seems like another lifetime.  My mind thought, "This is nonsense."  But my spirit wanted to take the journey, so journey we did.

I could see myself back in time, sitting at the piano as a young girl, playing and singing my heart out. In my lifetime, I have had three people, who I can recall, who encouraged my musical talent. My mother, an all-encompassing stalwart of support through the years.  A church youth leader who said my voice was more beautiful than that of a song bird. (It's not, but it's striking to me how I am able to recall his exact phrase now forty years later.)  And lastly, my eighth grade chorus instructor, who said I had pipes to fill an auditorium.   

What happened to that girl?

Too much to recount here, but the most persistent wearing agent: marriage.

As morbid as it sounds, I am understanding more and more that the day I married, I began to die. 

I'm not referencing the carnal death the Word encourages, but my soul's death.  

I know I am not an isolated occurrence, but I have fought more than a day's worth of thoughts, such as "Shouldn't we have been different? Didn't we know better?  Didn't we both know we had to sow into one another?  Isn't that why we married in the first place, to become everything in Christ He intended us to be?" 

I thought so. I hoped so. 

Nevertheless, deliberate destructive patterns were upheld, even defended.  I permitted myself to become all but forgotten. I'm not speaking of values, focus, or resolve. I'm speaking of the essence of me. Dreams and unfiltered emotions were exchanged for methods of survival from what seemed to be constant conflict and disregard.  

A bitter fact of life: choices are, by and large, understood through the lens of retrospection. 

Someone once said, "It's easy to mistake sorrow for despair. It's not. Authentic hope is found in sorrow, not by avoiding it." 

I agree. I spent years, decades in fact, with despair being my bedfellow, but now I spend my days making emotional space for sorrow, and I am finding personal hope again; rediscovering my essence as God leads me down a path to collect the discarded, forsaken, forgotten pieces of me. 

It's amazing what space is discovered when one gets off another's loop. 

I'm looking forward to making friends with me again. I have apologized to her for neglecting, and at times, all out ignoring, her cries for help, for acknowledgement, for nurture, for acceptance, for love ...for looking to my marriage to give that which it elected not to give. 

Religion is a monster.  It keeps wives discounted and marginalized with erroneous theology "for the sake of another."  The enemy is a pro at using Scripture to keep the well-intentioned spouse in man-made shackles. 

My freedom came when I heard Jesus whisper, "Deborah, I am not asking you to die for this when I already did."  Even now, tears well up at such profound Love as He.  

He is God. I am not. Yet, I matter.   

I matter.

Where religion held captive, relationship in Him set free.

He woke me recently, "Deborah, I want you completely unfettered."

I knew not then to the measure I know now, and greater still tomorrow, just how much my being craves this. 

We thrash about in shackles too numerous to fully identify, from the confines of religion to those of willful sin, when He deeply desires to set us free....FREE.

Through the years I have sat with Him and asked, "How do YOU take it day after day?  The betrayal, the idolatry, the wounding?"  

Though He has never answered me, I have seen Him smile that gentle smile of His, filled with compassion and understanding.  

He gets it because: "He was (is) despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, acquainted with deepest grief. We turned (turn) our backs on Him and looked (look) the other way. He was (is) despised and we did not (do not) care."  (Isa 53:3)

I'll never know why we persist on destructive paths of indifference, even as shackles rip at our being.

Death did come...

....so too, His resurrection... 

.................and because of His, I have the hope of mine.  🤍