Sharon, the Joyous Giant.

I was stalking the page of a fairly well-known worship leader the other day, reading her posts, watching her videos and I was floored by her joy. She exudes it. It pours out of her eyes, her mouth, her smile and her voice. She's like a big bright ball of sunshine that's so blinding you have to shield yourself from looking directly at her because the rays are just busting out everywhere. 

She is full of wonder and peace and joy and excitement over Jesus' love. She gushes on and on about Him. She is effervescent. And as I read her words and watched as she giggled and laughed and exuded this joy, I wept. 

Great, I thought, another thing to mourn. I have lost my joy. I listen to CDs of fantastic worship and half the time I am numb. I move my lips to sing and the words fall off my lips and feel strange and forced and foreign. I watch other people as they worship and tilt my head to the side in wonder as they so effortlessly offer up their praises and their words to the Father. I marvel at how easy it is for them to push through to that deeper level. 

Because that used to be me. It used to be. And now, I feel like a shell of a human. I'm half the woman I used to be. Half the worshiper. Half the leader.

Remember in The Little Mermaid, when Ursula turned Ariel and King Triton into the shriveled up mer-people and how pitiful and desperate they looked and sounded in that state? That's how I feel. Shrunken, tiny, minuscule and weak. But even though I am in this malnourished state where my growth has been stunted, I am still reaching out for bread and water. I am hungry. I am thirsty. I have been starving and although I am hesitant and mistrusting because I am wounded and broken, I want to be fed, I NEED to be fed and I MUST drink. I want to live again! I'm dying to live again!!

So I am striving. I am diligently pursuing my Father. I am finding His bread of life and I am drinking His living water. I am sipping and nibbling because it is so overwhelming. And I am finding my insatiable hunger and thirst is slowly coming back. I know that soon I will be devouring every morsel and drowning down every drop just to be reaching out for more!

And now, I have a secret to tell you. I've only told a few people this and you might laugh, it's okay, I don't mind. There's something really cool that happens to me when I worship. When I really, really worship with every fiber of my being, when every little part of me focuses in on giving my self completely to God and lavishing my love on Him and accepting His love for me, something happens to me in THAT moment. That moment when I've given Him my all and I am worshiping Him in absolute reckless abandon.

I become a giant. I'm not kidding you. In my spirit, in that moment I am no longer 5'2". I see myself rising taller and taller and taller until I am so tall I am nearly to the ceiling! It is such an amazing feeling, so euphoric, so heady, so rich and I am so, SO tall! I know that sounds funny. It is. It's weird. My spirit man is tall. For always having been a shorty, let me tell you, that feels really, really good. But man, when I worship God with all that is in me, I'm telling you people, I literally become a giant. 

I miss that. I miss my joy. And I miss my worship. And I'm so glad I'm getting it back. One bite, one sip, one song at a time. Oh how I love my Jesus.

Verbal Vomit.

I so did not want to go to our grief counseling this week. We hadn't been to the past two meetings because four weeks ago I was sick with the flu and two weeks ago I received news just before we were getting ready to leave that our former Pastor's father was about to pass away and it hit me and threw me into a basket case-crying, I can't breathe and I sure can't drive and sit in a room full of grieving people and hold my composure overwhelming hot mess mode.

So this Wednesday, after missing a couple of sessions, I felt anti-social and was just not in the mood to sit in that room with the other adults. But the kids wanted to go. It means so much to them to be able to sit in a room full of other kids their age and hear them expressing the same feelings they have about losing their parent and being able to talk about their daddy. They had missed going and looked at me with those pitiful, pleading eyes as they asked me "Mommy, are we going to The Warm Place tonight?" I told them "Yes, we'll go but only because I love you so much."

I have a serious love/hate relationship with our grief counseling. I hate introducing myself every other week and telling everyone who I lost, when I lost him and how I lost him. It pisses me off when half the adults there were already separated or divorced or whatever and so they don't feel the loss as deep as I do or at least that's the way I feel. It makes my heart beat fast before I have to speak and I feel like I can't breathe and like I need to run out of the room screaming. I hate feeling like that.

I put off speaking until I absolutely have to when it's my time to share because I am such a mess. Then I open my mouth and verbally vomit all my feelings. I choke up and pause and everyone is staring at me, listening to the un-edited, non-eloquent words as they pour out of my mouth, revealing my weakness, my anger, my fear, my horror, my loss, my frustration, my annoyance, my bitterness, my desperation, my hopelessness, my angst, my rage, my anxiety and my loneliness.

I stop and I say I'm done and they look at me with understanding and nod their heads and wipe their eyes after crying with me. And I realize this is why I still need to go. As much as I hate it. As much as I detest sitting in that room and hearing everyone's pain and feeling their anguish as we go one by one around the room describing our loss or our feelings, I need to be there. In that room, I feel abnormal and normal at the same time. Awkward and accepted. Angry and forgiven. 

I love going there. I hate going there. I have to keep going there.