More than anything, I feel the hollow places acutely. I don’t think that’s one of the five stages of grief, but that’s where I’m at. Not really sad or angry anymore, though I’m sure I’ll get there again, but just hollow. As if I’m a tree full of potential, vitality, and promise, but emptied out by a wasting disease. I hope that God will use the negative experience of the past decade to fill in all the hollow places once and for all. I hope for this and I want to believe it, but I’m not so sure.

I hope you can’t sleep until you realize that you had the ability to speak life or death over me during my worst nightmare and you chose death. You didn’t care that I was alone and practically motherless. You didn’t care that, in many ways, I raised myself and didn’t know how to do this. You didn’t care that I didn’t have the support that you did and I didn’t have friends (because you rejected me from the start) and I didn’t want this and I felt like I was dying. You didn’t care that I was doing my best. You only cared that I wasn’t doing your best.

I say this so that you will understand that when I tell you not to give up, it isn’t some foolishly optimistic platitude. It is an encouragement born from both the pain and the hope at the center of my soul.

I feel like the past ten years have been wasted time, wasted potential, and wasted resources. And, from the outside, empirically speaking, they have been. But that’s not the whole story.

What a surprise! What a delight! What sheer bewilderment it is to be alive and hear the birds and see the sunrise and feel the wind on your face and smell the rain coming (if you’re from the Southern United States) and touch icicles and eat cake! (I told you there was a poet hiding somewhere up in here. Maybe she’ll come out swinging when I’m 54.)

Are you starting to see it? What gratitude has done to me? I’m waxing eloquent about cake. Me, who loves the negative, is telling you that it’s a surprise, not a cosmic joke, to be alive.

He made the world in six days and then rested. He saved the world on Good Friday and then he rested again. In the tomb. Dark. Dead. Decaying, for all we knew. After his great work of rescuing his people from real slavery (that to sin and death), he rested, just as he had done in the beginning. Because it was never about accomplishing, achieving, or doing anything. It was about enjoying. It was about delight. It was about the work being finished by one so much more powerful and more capable than us that he can make the world with a word and save it with his blood.

If all of this is true, and I believe that it is, then we don’t have to earn anything. Second, if there’s nothing to earn, then we can truly rest. This is the whole idea behind Matthew 11:28-30. There is work to do and there’s a burden to bear, but it’s easy and light because our value and relationship with Jesus aren’t dependent upon our performance. Our value and relationship with Jesus is dependent upon the work he’s already completed for us.

We stop and stay awhile, wherever God has placed us, and trust in him to sustain us through whatever comes next.

Jesus alone, of all the world teachers, invites his followers to come and rest. Not come and work and change the world. Not come and see if you can be good enough. Not come and conform to these rules so that you can be “in”. Come and rest. You’re already worthy. You’re already enough. The work is already finished. Won’t you step into the life you were created for? Won’t you work with your limitations instead of against them? Don’t you, just a little, know that this is true?

Our perspective matters for more reasons than scientific accuracy, though. If I believe that, because my life is hard, God does not love me, then I’m going to start to do a few things. First, I may ask why he doesn’t love me. And, because of my personality and particular struggles with the darkness, I’m going to conclude that if I do enough good/right things, try hard enough, and punish my shortcomings more severely, then he will love me. In short, I’ll blame myself for my difficult circumstances and set out on a quest to control the outcome of my life. This isn’t a totally bad idea, which is why it’s a horrible lie.