(( For those who have followed my posts about the distressed student, I thought I would offer as an update an extract from this night’s journal ‘conversation’ with god. ))
One week of freedom, and with each day the tension ebbs from the cheeks, the sparkle intensifies in her eyes. The hands no longer shake, the voice no longer trembles, her stories of the day before recount the events she attended and the people she met rather than the many confrontations with her mom and how she spent the intervening eternities huddled in her room awaiting the worst yet to come.
She is graced. You know her well. Though I have told her that a dozen times, she disbelieves it. Not because she does not believe in You – she showed she does in her every act towards those around her awash in their own pain even as her own world suffocated her – but because she is not ready to acknowledge, not You, but herself. As You finally taught me, after so many misguided years, it is not in the following but in the leading that belief lies; one has to have the courage and strength to accept the calling and all that entails, and the “Yes you can” of Your Touch is frightening when you neither know nor trust yourself. She will “come around”, I’m sure. You will see to that.
Just as You did for me.
As a child, my head full of Narnia, myself abused and terrified, in both naivete and despair, I begged when someone cried out to You to be sent in first. You would always answer, I said, but I had to try. It would be decades before I knew what I had asked for, and that it would certainly be nothing like The Last Battle. But I never imagined it would be like this.
For months she would confide in no one else. You were kind enough to make up for the difference between Your skills and mine. When I finally was able to get Counseling Services involved, they made me primary point of contact, putting me in direct conflict with Administration. Three times I had to make decisions that might have cost me my job. You saw to it those became non-events. When it came time to move her, no one assisted except one colleague whose conflict between his “faculty” position and his sense that I solicited his help for a reason was evident in his face and conversation for days in advance – until he saw her home and her relief when we got the last load into her room. Take as good care of him as You have of me; in a way only You and I appreciate, he risked far more than he yet knows. Care makes us do things we do not expect ourselves to do. At least at first…. You will understand my smile when I say I don’t think he will ever be the same.
Beside and With and For and Through You is never easy, and I am certainly no expert at it. But tonight it is wonderful to be able to say “Wow, we done good, didn’t we!” Please help me be able to say the same next Samhuinn, Dear One.