I think life is about finding words. I think that we walk down the paths that we do in the hopes of finding and collecting words and fragments of phrases that will help us articulate our existence. When we are born, we are speechless save for the initial cry of commencement. Vulnerable, rebellious and blurry, I believe it is our first instinctual cry for God and it is all we know to do emerging from our red darkness. We hadn't yet known any other saving touch except for the hands of our Father who formed us in the depths of the earth and knit our hearts together with love and promise.
And then we quickly were silenced and hushed with pacifiers of promises and soothing whispers from figures unknown. "There, there... Don't cry... No more tears..." And from that moment on, we are trained to believe that crying is associated with "wrongness" and tears are highly unfavorable and so our natural inclination to cry for help, or at all for that matter, is waned away. When we fall off our bikes and scrape our knees, we are taught to hold back our tears and muster our courage. Don't you dare cry in public, you'll make a scene. You really shouldn't cry over relationships or people- it's a sign of weakness. You certainly can't cry if you are a man but if you must, you must not cry openly.
But this whole time, I think we began to lose a vital element of our experience. We started losing our ability to signal our distress and the God who heard our first cries is relegated to a mere assistant and not our sole Savior. And so pride convinced us that we cannot adequately communicate with God unless we found the perfectly fitting phrases to articulate our plea. So we walk through life collecting words in our pockets like treasures forgetting that our first prayer was only just a cry.
Very good.
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