Once Was Lost

I wonder how you're supposed to know the exact moment when there's no more hope.

It's not words, so much, just my mind going blank and thoughts reaching up up up, me wishing I could climb through the ceiling and over the stars until I can find God, really see God, and know once and for all that everything I've believed my whole life is true, and real. Or, not even everything. Not even half. Just the part about someone or something bigger than us who doesn't lose track. I want to believe the stories, that there really is someone who would search the whole mountainside just to find that one lost thing that he loves, and bring it home.

A know a place called New Beginnings, but I don't think it works quite like that. You can't just erase everything that came before.

It's like a Venn diagram of tragedy.

We'd need a miracle," he says. "A real one. Do you think those happen anymore?

It makes me think of Lazarus. He must have had those shadows after his miracle. You don't spend time in the tomb without it changing you, and everyone who was waiting for you to come out.

Mom always says that doubt is just another way of expressing faith.

The Lord doesn't give a person more than he knows they can bear.

Right now I would love to have a personal message from God. I want to believe the way I used to, when my dad or mom or sometimes both of them would pray with me at night and I would picture God listening, kind-eyed and bearded. He was real to me, as real as my own parents. I don't know when God stopped being someone I saw as my true friend, and turned into something I'm mostly confused about.

Now I think miracles are things that happen in stained glass, and on dusty Jerusalem roads thousands of years ago. Not here, not to us. Not when we need them.

Mom always says that doubt is just another way of expressing faith... This is different than doubt. This is something I've never felt before, a total absence of whatever it is that's made me who I am, on the inside, all my life.

Right now it's like we're three islands, and nothing but oceans between us.