A Lament

As we teeter on the edge of a new year today, I feel fairly certain many people are looking back on 2013 and considering whether or not it was a good year. I have been. I will say it was a rough year for me. I wanted this New Year’s message to be different than the one I am going to write, but my heart hurts and I am finding it very hard to “count it all joy…” as Peter instructed the early Christians.

This year began so promising. Work was going well, the family was healthy, and I was stable. Every Sunday I looked forward to helping lead worship at church as a part of the praise team. Daily I could look at the blessings God poured out on me and lift up a grateful heart in prayer and praise. There were some bumps in the road, but they were minor.

But then I lost a friend and coworker to a fast moving rare cancer. She died within eight weeks of her diagnosis. It was a blow to me and to my work place. I really wrestled over it. She was young, and left behind a grieving husband and three children under 14 years of age. For reasons only God knows, not more than two months later, I began a slow downward spiral into deep depression.

Medication adjustments did little to help as each day my mental health deteriorated. By August, I was suicidal and with prompting, admitted myself to the hospital my psychiatrist directed me to. I was so demoralized by that point and I felt defeated, hopeless, and helpless. More medication changes, a week of intensive therapy and the start-up of ECT treatments (Electro Convulsive Therapy) and I was released feeling I was on steadier ground. The strong suicidal feelings abated and I felt like I still had a place in the world. But I was off work for thirteen weeks and it took every one of them to climb back up to where I felt I was strong enough to return.

Then my mother fell and broke her upper arm, requiring surgery. Within the month she fell again and broke her hip, requiring more surgery. At 93, it was just too much to take and she began to lose ground. She was three hours away where I could not just drive to the hospital and visit daily. Not being there was difficult.

I went to be with her for a weekend and then made arrangements to get off work and went back down for what would be her final week on earth. We moved her to my brother’s home where she could be surrounded by family and a vigil was kept around the clock. What time was left I spent telling her how much I loved her, and watched and waited with my brother and sister as she slipped first into a coma, and then into eternity. Her memorial service was four days before Christmas.

Stable, healthy, sorrowful, depressed, suicidal, heartbroken, and now it’s New Year’s Eve. The year is over and I am looking back too weary to even ask why. My only prayer is Psalm 61:1-4a.

“Hear my cry, O God; listen to my prayer. From the end of the earth I call to you, when my heart is faint. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I; for you are my refuge, a strong tower against the enemy. Let me abide in your tent forever, find refuge under the shelter of your wings. Selah.”

I suppose this blog entry would be aptly called a lament. I have poured out my soul and complaints in the presence of God and his people. There isn’t much more to say. If anything can be pulled out of this that may be uplifting perhaps it is that God has not abandoned me and I do know that. But I feel raw, broken on the wheel and hurt too much to say more than that.

This is longer than I generally write and if anyone has read it completely, I thank you. You have given me a gift to begin the New Year: friendship, care, and a sense of not being left alone in this maze of pain. You are the face of God toward me that I can see and touch. I earnestly hope when I get back on my feet, I will be the same toward you.