The Great Iconoclast pt II

I wrote this in a journal yesterday. Today, I have decided to post it. Consider this the sequel to the post "The Great Iconoclast."

So this life's about card castles. Well, of course that's not what this life's about--are you kidding? Feeling, recognizing beauty and its perversion, creating and imagining, healing and hating, changing and inspiring change, accepting and rejecting, sacrificing and loving. No. We're capable of too much. This life is not about card castles. But that's what we make it about.

Like I've said before, I think I love card castles, because I just can't leave them alone. They are so much fun to build, but it sucks when they fall. and they always fall. They're just paper--of course they fall. Geeze, no matter how many times I watch my castles fall, I always turn back to rebuilding them. I don't know if there's another option. Gosh, it hurts so much when they fall. It's only by the grace of that same great Iconoclast that I don't die when my castles do, because I should die. For some reason, some greater purpose than just building castles (I hope), I am spared from death--but never from pain.

I love what C.S. Lewis says: "God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains" (The Problem With Pain). That's good stuff. Listen: if anything, I can be a testimony to that. God is a God of the broken, of the hopeless, of the hurting. I've heard God's voice louder than I ever have in the midst of all this pain, in the midst of the wreakage of this castle I've built and watched fall. There is so much pain here, in these ruins.

That's not what hurts the most though--watching the castle fall, that is. What hurts the most is letting go of all the broken pieces. I've been holding on so tight, and those pieces that functioned so incredibly before as a part of my castle now cut deep into my clenched hands. The sharp, jagged edges draw blood real fast. Biting, stinging, intense pain. And yet it's so hard to let go of those stupid pieces. It's so scary to trust that it's okay, that it will all be okay. It's so hard to see that there's anything else to hold on to. And so I just keep clenching and squeezing and holding on to my broken pieces, and I just keep hurting...

But. No. More.

I'm dropping these pieces.

"They keep on replying, 'But I tell you the man broke a most solemn promise.' Exactly: that is precisely what you have to forgive. This doesn't mean that you must necessarily believe his next promise [praise God]. It does mean that you must make every effort to kill every taste of resentment in your own heart--every wish to humiliate or hurt him or to pay him out." --C.S. Lewis (The Weight of Glory)

The Heart of the Matter (<--click it!)