In an effort to not simply tack up a bunch of disjointed ideas on this blog, I thought I’d continue the subject of gentleness and how challenging it can be when you’re new to it. God gave me a taste of the grace of gentleness under ideal conditions. Immediately after, He gave me a test.
That night I slept very badly. Poor sleep is an old enemy of mine, and it usually results in some flashbacks of the worst time of my life- it’s happened twice, once at sixteen and again at twenty-one, when I got this tomfool fright in my head about the process of and ability to sleep, and couldn’t sleep more than an hour a night for a few months. One of my deepest fears is that a period like that would come upon me once again. I don’t really believe it would; my brain and body have changed so much since my pregnancy, and I am able to nap for the first time in my life. That’s a clue that it’s all good.
Anyway, whenever I have a night (or nights) of poor sleep, the old fears creep up, and I become a monster. That’s what happens when fear crowds out love. I was irritable (beyond what fatigue would produce), agitated, impatient and self-seeking. All I could think of was to relieve myself of this bugbear, by any means possible: meaningless distraction, shopping, trying to reinvent myself, even if just for the moment until the panic subsides. My wifeliness and homekeeping fell to the bottom of my list. The day after a bad night becomes an exhibition of all the dumb things I’ve moved beyond since my early adulthood.
This time, it became the adversary of my efforts toward a gentle and quiet spirit. I don’t think I’ve totally recovered them. I have since caught up on sleep, and have resumed my usual homemaking routine, but as soon as I did, it became clear that I’d fallen on my face when presented with my first “gentleness quiz.” Did I turn to God for strength and peace and the grace to carry on in love? Well, eventually. How long did it take me? About sixteen hours. Too long. In the meantime, as I said, I resorted to all my foolish tricks of years past. It is a constant thing, this work toward gentleness.
The best thing I can say is that for the first time in this kind of situation, I did return to Him before the full twenty-four hours had passed. And as I sought Him, I saw results. God is real, He is there for us. I may have failed, or at least, passed with a D for diploma, but He is always there, no matter what we have done.
He remains faithful when we lose our faith, hope, love, or our minds. Turning to material things, a new hair color, a pagan practice, a useless distraction, instead of Him, has always resulted in self-loathing and emptiness. It may take awhile, but the gnawing sense of lack doesn’t disappear. When I turned to God, He didn’t simply relieve me of my fear, but also replaced the fear with love. And wholeness. Thankfully, with that came gentleness once again.
It is a struggle to maintain it. It is hard to keep mindful of it. With my eyes on Jesus, it is less of a burden. I am serious. I have a few atheist and many agnostic friends. I’m sure they could come up with a slew of reasons why this had nothing to do with God, but simply a changing of my focus away from old habits, or some such thing.
It actually helps sometimes to play my own devil’s advocate. From that kind of analysis, as the sole proprietor of my brain, I can tell you that it really was the Lord. Nothing in this world has the capacity to give me a refill of true love and wholeness except for Him. There are some convincing decoys and knock-offs, but the truth is that Jesus is the real deal. He is the way, the truth and the life. I can’t prove it to you. But I can tell you that I know Him, and I can tell you what He has done for me. He can do it for you, and He will, every time.
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