When Nothing Else Matters

Have you ever had one of those days that you feel so stressed and so overwhelmed that you are suffocating under the pressure. You feel like someone is literally holding your head under the water and you simply cannot breath. There is no hope, no light at the end of the tunnel--the tunnel goes on forever. In my experience, there is no imaginable pain that the body can feel that outweighs the pain of a mental assault. You pray over and over for God to take it way...or for Him to take you away.

I have been there many times over the past several months and, unfortunately, I still get to that point from time to time. However, I don't stay in that place as long as I once did. There was a time when I would stay in this dark and frightening world for days at a time; only sleep would give me a short escape--a time to catch my breath. Every time I entered into this darkness, I would ask God over and over: why are you letting we go through this? Why wont You just take away the struggle and the torment?

I still do not fully understand the answer to those questions; however, I am at a place now where I can pray away the bad feelings and thoughts. How have I done this? Well, I have not done anything. God has given me the grace that I need to get through a time in my life that is not meant to be easy--a time in my life when God is using the mental turmoil that I am facing to show me that He is the only one who can calm the storm in me. How can we truly know the power of God unless we feel it in our own lives? How can I tell someone who is going through a hard time that God is with them when I have not felt His presence in my hard times?

How did I reach this point? The darkness grew darker, the storm grew stronger, and there was no breath left in my lungs. I didn't even want to go on living my tortured existence. So I gave up. I got to the point where nothing else mattered but God. I just said, "God, I surrender. You win". That day, I felt that I was finally at peace, that I had died. And I felt that I was more awake to the presence of God. It is the single most invigorating sensation to be at peace in the presence of God. It felt exactly like George MacDonald's poem:

Thy fishes breathe but where thy waters roll;

Thy birds fly but within thy airy sea;

My soul breathes only in thy infinite soul;

I breathe, I think, I love, I live but thee.

Oh, breath, oh, sink--O Love, live into me.