I am going to tell you a dark secret. One that’s touched my sister, my daughter and myself. Through us it’s probably touched you too though you may not be aware of it. We have a bent toward depression. By grace we don’t meet the full clinical definition. Often it hovers. Some days it lands. “With a shiver in my bones just thinking about the weather, a quiver in my lips as if i might cry, by the force of will my lungs are filled and so I breathe.” I dislike mornings. Daytime motivation comes hard sometimes.
My dad was 5150’d. Late in his life, angry seventy-plus
years of it. When he was released, I asked him if he’d thought about God. “No,”
he said. “I thought about nothing for the whole time. Nothing.” That darkness,
that ‘nothing’ wasn’t ever talked about. Seems he would just disappear. I think
it would be easy to spiral, spiral, down. Beauty saves me.
It's why Spotify is a constant stream I drink from. I
suspect it’s why I’m an extrovert. I seek your companionship. Call it selfish.
It’s your beauty I choose to bask in. Your laughter that brightens the dark. Your
shared Instagram memes crack me up. Your insights, crafted-ness and God-given
perspective that cause me to gasp in wonder and awe. Silly and authentic. My
sober guard comes down and darkness flies afar.
“I not only have my secrets, I am my secrets. And you are
your secrets,” wrote Buechner. Authors asking questions of the human condition.
The Buechners, the Dillards, the Yanceys and Mannings whose anchor chains and mud
hooks keep me moored to hope. “Our secrets are human secrets, and our trusting
each other enough to share them with each other has much to do with the secret
of what it is to be human.”
