Previous Challenge Entry (Level 4 – Masters)
Topic: Board - Bored (01/12/23)
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TITLE: Clearing the View | Previous Challenge Entry
By Terry R A Eissfeldt
01/17/23 -
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Maybe I’m bored or it’s a type of Stockholm syndrome. Or it’s due to ill formed memories from living with the results of trauma.
Whatever the case I must pull on all my senses to grasp reality.
What were the past few years really like?
The answer rises out of the foggy mist of pain, loss and betrayal: excruciating.
Interesting fact: the word ‘excruciate’ was made up to describe the particular pain endured by someone hanging on a Roman cross…
Oh the old rugged cross…
I was brought up with two different views of the cross.
First, as a child in a very traditional church, the cross was a bloodied splintered board stained with the price of my redemption.
I was not allowed to forget the excruciating pain Jesus suffered for me, pain from nails bored through His perfect flesh into that cruel wood, or His agonizing death so I could be accepted by God.
I relived the scene every second Sunday of the month accompanied with appropriate amounts of begging and pleading that the Lamb of God would once again take away my sins.
Later I went to a newer type of church. By newer I mean the songs we sang were less than two hundred years old. And there were padded chairs instead of wooden pews. And instead of a pipe organ there was a band with guitars and even a drummer.
Here the cross was celebrated. Christ’s death, acknowledged for the salvation it bought, was balanced with the exuberant triumph of an empty grave.
Yes the old rugged cross was made up of blood stained boards with the remnants of holes bored in showing where Christ hung, but the focus was that it was empty.
It’s a great comfort knowing Jesus paid it all and He bore every stripe for my healing however pain, whether physical, emotional, mental or spiritual becomes a bore very quickly.
You see what happens is that my world becomes small, insular and monochromatic.
I feel one shade: grey.
It’s exhausting.
And exhausted people are bored.
Bored with the pain.
Bored with the loneliness.
Bored with God who seems so distant.
And even with a rock solid faith that God is good and His love endures forever the boredom of chronic pain can become a prison.
It’s like my heart is walled in. My mind, will and emotions are controlled by a prison guard and all I can do is scratch a line on a board to mark time.
The thing is everyone goes through a dark night of the soul now and again.
I wish it was a one time experience and that the lessons learned transferred to the next time. But they don’t. Each journey to the grey is singular.
The only thing I can hold on to is that God is indeed good and His love does endure forever. I also find comfort and clarity in His promise to never leave me or forsake me.
Even when I feel He is distant, uncaring or indifferent He isn’t.
One of my favourite verses is:
“Weeping may last for the night, But a shout of joy comes in the morning.” Psalms 30:5b NASB
I know the sun is really shining over the fog so I have faith God is still good even when I am surrounded and hemmed in.
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