Lift Up My Soul

A sliver of light cracks open the night sky and I'm awake. I fumble for my light spring robe, shrug it over my shoulders. Usually I am my happiest in the first hour of the day: I anticipate possibilities. But not today.

I'm hungry. I shuffle to the kitchen and find a bowl and fill it with granola. The baked oat flakes clink like coins against the glass sides. I add strawberries and milk. Then I set up the coffee maker. Brown like newly tilled earth, coffee grounds in a small heap comfort me with their fragrance. What is it about coffee that makes us feel better? I was reading recently that a strong cup of coffee is the most popular comfort for hard times.

For that's what I have here: hard times.

They come to all of us. They will come to you, too, unless you are in that very tiny percentage of people who lead an untroubled life.

Here's the thing: for over two years, I kept thinking mine would end. That they were temporary.

But it's not over yet. I'm more challenged to live by faith than I ever have been. I feel as though I've dived into thin air over a cliff and I'm still in free fall.

Try living in free fall for two years. It does things to your sense of balance.

Where is my longing in all of this? What role does it play? Do I even have room for it anymore?

This is precisely where the devil can take us down. We decide that life is so hard, we've no room for longing. We've no energy for it. So we shut down. We batten our souls, so we are like houses shuttered and boarded against a hurricane. Our lives are one hurricane after another.

To notice my longing and be fully alive in it, I must open up my house. God help me, I must open it up. I must let myself feel what is happening to me. I must let myself remember what I truly, deep in my heart, want most and not give up on it.

God help me, I must do it.

Otherwise, I will dry up and blow like dust in the wind. Like coffee grounds when I accidentally breathe hard on them. I shut the coffee filter in and push the button for brewing. But I do not know how to go on any longer. I do not know how.

Tears lie under the surface of my skin, but I am dry as bone when I take my cereal to the table and open my Bible and read:

Hear my prayer, O Lord;

give ear to my pleas for mercy!

In your faithfulness answer me, in your righteousness! . . .

For the enemy has pursued my soul;

he has crushed my life to the ground;

he has made me sit in darkness like those long dead.

Therefore my spirit faints within me;

my heart within me is appalled.

I remember the days of old;

I meditate on all that you have done;

I ponder the work of your hands.

I stretch out my hands to you;

my soul thirsts for you like a parched land.

Answer me quickly, O Lord!

My spirit fails!

Hide not your face from me,

lest I be like those who go down to the pit.

Let me hear in the morning of your steadfast love,

for in you I trust.

Make me know the way I should go,

for to you I lift up my soul.

(Psalm 143)

Had Jesus appeared and sung for me with a guitar, it could not be more piercing. God has not told me what he will do, but he has shown me how he weeps with me, waits with me, yearns with me. How do I lift my soul? That's what I'm pondering.

How do you lift up your soul?

(Photograph of stone cairn pointing the way on a path near Sam's Knob, Blue Ridge Parkway, copyright 2011 by Cassandra Frear)