It is humbling to find yourself shaking so hard you can’t breathe. Last night was a rough war in my soul as I fought against inner demons and what I know to be true. My first reaction is to always hide or build a wall. Obviously, it then becomes harder for Daniel to comfort or console me.
But last night was different. Daniel started by basically asking me, “what is something I could do for you to comfort your heart?” And without thinking, I said, “play the guitar.”
And so I scrunched the pillows all around me and Daniel sat on the bed and played the most hauntingly beautiful melodies that I have ever heard. It was dark in the bedroom except for the flicker of the candle on the nightstand but he could still see the tears starting to streak my face. At one moment, he started to put the guitar down to hold me and I whispered, “no, keep playing.”
All I know is that in the moments of my heart-ache, it seemed like each chord, each string and each song he played echoed my pain. And then it hit me, these are the places that remind us what really matters. It’s so easy to fall apart and let life, circumstances, and words ruin our peace. But in the depths of my soul, I knew better.
And the music and tears seemed to be the way to let it all out. Charles Swindoll once said, “It is His desire to create within His children a capacity for endurance. And that capacity is cultivateed mainly through hardship, disappointment, misunderstanding, as well as physical, and often emotional, pain and heartache.”
I’m realizing that life isn’t about just being fulfilled our feeling good about one’s self. But it is about finding your satisfaction solely in God.
Malcolm Muggeridge wrote the following in his book, A Twentieth Century Testimony:
Contrary to what might be expected, I look back on experiences that at the time seemed especially desolating and painful with particular satisfaction. Indeed, I can say with complete truthfulness that everything I have learned in my seventy-five years in this world, everything that has truly enhanced and enlightened my existence, has been through affliction and not through happiness, whether pursued or attained. In other words, if it ever were to be possible to eliminate affliction from our earthly existence by means of some drug or other medical mumbo jumbo, as Aldous Huxley envisaged in Brave New World, the result would not be to make life delectable, but to make it too banal and trivial to be endurable. This, of course, is what the cross signifies. And it is the cross, more than anything else, that has called me inexorably to Christ.
As a dear friend often says, “hard places make good soldiers.”