I think admiring the clouds for their beauty is needed. Looking at them, with all their fluffiness, sheerness, and magnitude is the perspective to take on. Living in them however can leave you in a scary unfamiliar place that was never intended to be lived in.
I was reminded of this about a couple weeks ago. Probably by far the hardest week I've had being here. Everything seemed as if it was wrong. Things that I try to keep separate and compartmentalized all seemed to clash into this one messy pot of disaster. I find myself wearing a lot of hats while living and working over here, and sometimes it is heavy and complex. And with that complexity comes a real need for understanding and being ok with the realities at hand. Sometimes this heaviness turns into us making up truths about all these things so that we can cope with the hard things. I found myself creating false joys to simply numb myself to seeing what's exactly in front of my face. The reality is that everyday I walk by someone hurting, starving, being abused, or neglected. The reality is that we are trying to get precious girls out of awful places. And the truth is that sometimes that gets real messy really fast.
And I found myself living in clouds all high on everything that's fluffy and shiny. I had forgotten the reality of what we are actually doing here. And a couple weeks ago all that was lifted, reality set in, and I saw once again why we are here. The complete messiness of it, I felt again the heaviness of it in my own personal life. And at first my head didn't like that now I wasn't living in the clouds with all things that are good. But then my heart remembered what it is to feel again. Numbness gone. Pain. Heartbreak, and in that moment I realized that this is where I'm supposed to live. I'm supposed to live in the reality where all the hurting is. But amongst all the hurting bring this unexplainable joy and love despite it all. Seeing the pain and feeling it, is ok, letting it creep into your actual daily life, is ok, wallowing in it, is ok. But that's not the end of the story. Your Maker offers this over abounding hope and redemption. When all you want to do is cry, somehow you get joy, because you know the ending to the story, and it's a beautiful one.
Lets stop numbing ourselves with artificial joys because we don't want to see the bad. Lets stop finding joy in things that are not eternal. Lets look at the bad, square on in the face. Lets not just cry but hurt and actually feel everything that the suffering are feeling. If we do that we will begin to look like that Man we claim to follow. It will go against everything we've been taught, but the hopeless will start to see that glimmer and true joy will be restored.
