Daylight

Anyone who knows me may have guessed that it has been...probably close to months since I saw a sunrise.  Today is the first time in a really, really long time, and I'll be honest, it made me feel kind of sad.  As of now, there are no new discoveries regarding my sleeping problems, and my future feels kind of dark.  Not dark like I have no future.  No, I mean dark in regards to the lack of daylight I seem to see.  I remember a month when I was going to Dordt back...four years ago when I saw sunsets and sunrises but nothing inbetween.  That was a difficult time.  I need the sun.

I just spent several hours with Spanky discussing some of the problems associated with our worship team.  The problems are too long to list, so I won't even try.  What is so difficult about all of that mess is that I am no longer a functioning member of the worship team.  I substitute here and there, but I do not consider myself part of the team (my choice, not theirs), so some of this stuff has nothing to do with me.  On the other hand, I still feel a strong link to the team, and I can feel the tension growing and feel completely helpless as far as stopping it.  It isn't my job or my place to tell anyone what to do, but I think I can say, at least, that the team needs to be communicating.  And they aren't.

That seems to be an incredibly huge problem.  No one can communicate effectively with other people (me included, thus the blog).  I see it with the couple I live with; I see it in the worship team; I see it in my friendships; I can even see it in the classroom.  Why did this happen?  What happened to the human ability to communicate with one another? 

I can't help recalling a message I heard (yes, Mars Hill) a couple years ago, that I have listened to a few hundred times since, called "When You Can't Go On".  The speaker was a man named Brad Gray, and he began talking about the pain of suffering through trials and losses, and also about how incapable people are with communicating during difficult circumstances.  Rob Bell also talked about this during one of his Lamentations messages (about two months ago).  The idea is this:  If we haven't learned to deal with our own pain, how can we sympathize with someone else's pain?  Brad Gray mentioned a statistic in his message.  The average person asks two meaningful questions per conversation.  That's how things are.  All of us are holding something in, especially me.  And it's tearing everything up.

Sunrises are supposed to be symbols of new beginnings.  That's what I'm told.  But what I feel even more is that my future, dark or whatever, isn't going to be hopeless.  I still get to see the sunrise every so often.  And those times are worth the wait sometimes.