A Jug of Milk

I'm one of those who cry over spilled milk. So do you mind if I open the top and pour out my frustration and hurt and confusion all over the countertop?

Maybe I shouldn't be telling you this, but I'm not good with finding that line of where you should stop, so I'm going to tell you anyways.

I don't know what I'm doing. And I don't know where I'm going. Don't get me wrong, I have a to-do list the length of Santa's naughty or nice list, but as far as what I should do next? Yeah, I'm lost.

You see, I feel like I've gone no where. I feel like I turned onto the path I thought God wanted me to take and drove, drove, drove, but in the end, isn't that the same tree I've passed now twenty times?

I've been here before, asking for affirmation and receiving only silence.

Crickets.

Jeanne Guyon says, "Will you worship God when He's far away?" (so I shouldn't have put that in quotes since I'm paraphrasing...)

People say, "If you're far from God, guess who moved." Maybe sometimes that's true, but not always. Did Job move? Habbakuk?

Speaking of Job, why didn't the author give us a timeline? How long did he wait in his sackcloth before God met him? A few days? A week? A year? Do I need to don burlap?

Or Habbakuk, waiting, waiting, waiting at that post. And then God gave him a yucky answer.

Yes, yucky.

I don't like who I am right now, all messy and teary and Mara.

My sister-in-law told me last night how she watched Stranger than Fiction the other day and thought of me, of course. The DVD has those extras, as most DVDs do, you know, including an interview with Emma Thompson. Emma said something about writers being depressed.

"And I thought, 'But Heather's not depressed!'" she told me.

How did I pull that off? I must be a better actor than I thought I was.

If I've been here before, shouldn't I know how to handle this? When you walk through these doors that you thought God opened for you only to find an empty room and all the furniture's been moved, and, look, black mold creeps up the door frame.

So then I think, well, maybe I should go get a Ph.D. But then where would I be? Another degree that got me no where.

Or maybe we should start thinking about having kids. But then I hide in the closet trembling and barely breathing--oh! shh! shh!--until the idea leaves.

Remember that lesson I related about the fire burning bright? I said I want to be the kind of Christian that smolders and radiates heat. Now my flames don't lick as high in the sky, and I wonder, are the coals at least hotter? Could you toast a marshmallow? Because the night air's chilly.