Hope in the Hopeless

It has been a very long time since I last posted to my blog. Much has happened in that time. It’s been difficult to write anything. Life has been, well, life. Nowhere are Christians exempt from the trials and buffeting of events that can leave us reeling, and I have been reeling for months.

Everything began to unravel in August of 2014. I was hospitalized for severe depression. I was in for several days until they thought I was stable again. Then again in December I was hospitalized due to what appeared to be mania. I was in for days until I appeared stable. Then in January, I was hospitalized for six days because I had become psychotic. The frightening thing about the hospitalizations is I have absolutely no memory of them. I have no memory of having a car accident while I was psychotic leading to my third time in the hospital. I have no memory of my breakdown at work for which I was sent home for extreme paranoia and hallucinations. It is all a blank.

Now my job is in jeopardy. I am off on unpaid leave for a minimum of eight weeks and a maximum of nineteen weeks. I took the leave hoping to salvage my job. I have complete short term memory loss, difficulty concentrating and am suffering from a sense of hopelessness about saving my job of eleven years. Several more months of working and  I will have much better retirement benefits, but I will only have ten days when I go back to show my boss I can still do my job. It’s as though life has conspired to beat me into the dust.

I pray. I pray a lot about being able to save my job. If I cannot demonstrate ability to do the job I have done for years I will be summarily fired. That’s it. No grace. Ten days. There have been many changes since I took off and I will have to learn new procedures as well as do what I was able to do before my mental breakdown. It isn't  much time to pull it together. It’s hard to not feel hopeless. It really is.

So, you the reader, may be asking the same question I am: Why? Maybe not. Maybe everyone else can see what’s going on and just I am in the dark. I really don’t know why God has led me down this road. Yes, some may say it’s to make me stronger or bring me to my knees with nothing left of myself so God can fill me up; my bipolar disorder is a cross to bear. None of those are very comforting. It’s like telling parents burying a child that at least they have more. Cold comfort and certainly not Holy Spirit inspired. It only kicks them cruelly while they are down.

No one suffering deserves platitudes. I have to wonder how many times I have tossed a platitude at someone suffering like a dry bone offered to the starving. I ashamed to think how many times I probably have done so. God forgive me. I am not looking for great words of wisdom. I fear at this point they would fall on deaf ears. I am like a person on a ship tossed about by tempestuous waves and cannot gain a firm stance. The only thing keeping me from being washed over into the sea is a tether tied to the mast.

Will I lose all sanity? Am I going to be in and out of institutions the rest of my life? Those questions are continually careening around my mind. I have no answers. I am not sure I will get answers.

The only glimmer of hope I have is the tether tied to the mast. I know I didn't tie it and I can only hope the mast holds. If I may be excused in making an analogy, the tether had to have been tied by Jesus. The tether is the Holy Spirit, and the mast the Father. It’s the only thing that makes any sense in my senseless mind. I cannot hold on. I just can’t. But the tether is keeping me, it’s holding onto me. In my utter weakness I am not going to sink into the unreachable and unfathomable depths that never give back what has been washed overboard.

 I feel lost, but Psalm 139 says, “Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there. If I take the wings of the morning and settle at the farthest limits of the sea, even there your hand shall lead me, your right hand shall hold me fast. If I say, ‘Surely darkness shall cover me, and the light around me become night,’ even the darkness is not dark to you; the night is as bright as the day, for darkness is light to you.”

This alone is my only hope. What is weakness in me is strength in the Lord. My boss and the rest of the world may write me off as a mental case, but somehow God will keep me alive. I don’t know how, but somehow, he will make it happen.