"The mild red road goes on beneath the slanting and peaceful afternoon, mounting a hill. 'Well, I can bear a hill,' he thinks. 'I can bear a hill, a man can.' It is peaceful and still, familiar with seven years. 'It seems like a man can just about bear anything. He can even bear what he never done. He can even bear the thinking how some things is just more than he can bear. He can even bear it that if he could just give down and cry, he wouldn't do it. He can even bear it to not look back, even when he knows that looking back or not looking back wont do him any good."
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"It was all coming down on her too fast. There was too much reality that her hands and eyes could not deny, and too much that must be taken for granted that her hands and eyes could not prove; too much of the inexplicable that hands and eyes were asked too suddenly to accept and believe without proof. After thirty years it must have been like a person in solitary blundering suddenly into a room full of strange people all talking at once, and she casting desperately about for anything that would hold sanity together by choosing some logical course of action which would be within her limitations, which she could have some assurance of being able to perform."~both quotes from Light in August by Wm Faulkner
* * *
Lately I've thought that if a person who sat in front of me asked me how I was doing I'd collapse in front of them, tears flowing. Likely I would. We're so stoic. Life sort of shatters without our permission, children wander off down the wide road, and we wring our hands. Crushed. Some days I feel as if I'm holding my breath.
Last night I asked Gary if when a person is involved in a decadent lifestyle they get full up with the weight of it. He asked what I was driving at, and I said I was reaching for straws, wanting our boys to stop filling that God-shaped void with bad living. My husband had his own issues as a young man, before I met him, so I knew he understood where I was going with it. He said his own experience was that he knew when he'd reached a place where he had to make a change or suffer permanent consequences. He added that he hoped our boys would feel the Spirit's absence before it was too late.
Amen.
