I Broke...

the girl who seemed unbreakable,
broke.
she dropped the fake smile and whispered,
"jesus i can't do this anymore."
and he replied,
"daughter, i never wanted you to,
i've been waiting for you to
let me carry you."

This is me, now.

For several weeks I have felt the breaking coming. Work has been a bear - more than that really. I lack the language skills to adequately describe it all. The people are:

• Truly stupid.
• Argumentative. 
• Know-it-alls.
• Literally filthy pigs. 

And the job itself - bombarded from all sides all day, every day. Not a moment to catch my breath before something else is shoved in my face with its attendant demands. And the load increases daily with no relief ever offered. Because there is none available. Not now. Not in the future. It is "the way" of the working world now.

I am surrounded by this day in and day out. It is a rough unpleasant experience.

Which brings me to the inevitable conclusion that I am burned out on my job. And I'm 3.5 years away from, hopefully, getting out of the great american rat race. So I must find a way to endure this - because I've been in this race for long enough to know it's not going to improve.

All of which reminds me that, despite my ego preferring to believe that I am in control, I am not in control. As I screamed in frustration this past week, I found myself angry with God.

For not protecting me from all this. For not cushioning my fall as I broke. For not being there to ease my burdens.

And then I realized - he's always there. But I haven't acknowledged him in weeks. Not truly. Oh I've said my prayers over meals, my nightly prayer as a fall asleep. But those are by rote...I know they are prayers but they aren't from my heart.

Not the prayer I need to be saying right now - to search out God, to ask him to see into my heart, and to take these burdens from me. He doesn't want me to break.

And therein lies the hardest question any Christian can ask - why does God allow suffering?

I have no easy answer, in truth no one does. Oh we have platitudes to say about how God wants to draw us closer to him so suffering is his way of getting that.

Sounds pretty - harsh - when you put it like that.

We can talk about free will of course. We are all free to make whatever choices we want and deal with the consequences - good or ill.

Again, pretty harsh.

Or we can talk about God's love for us. Which is always there no matter who we are, what we do, where we are, or how we behave.

I prefer to think of that. In the moment this past week when I lashed out at God - I felt horrible right away. I know God has "broad shoulders" and can handle my feeble attempts at getting angry with him.

Because that's all they are - feeble attempts. In the end, I collapsed on my bed, spent & exhausted from a bruising day of constant abuse and manipulation, absent of even the most common of courtesies. And turned to God and simply said - please lord, help me.

And he did. I immediately felt a little lighter, and went back to my at-home office and made the command decision to take Friday off. I'm glad I did. I'm halfway thru an unexpected 3-day weekend and while my perspective is still somewhat clouded by the lingering discomfort of my last few work weeks, I know that God is on my side. Always.

So when I break again, as I inevitably will some weeks or months from now, I pray I can look back on the moment this past Thursday when I finally set all the burdens down and asked God to pick them up for me.

Because it is what he wants to do. Because he loves us and we are never alone.