I am taking care of my mother with Alzheimers: the lions share of the labor falls on me. She is unable to take care of the most basic daily tasks. Words cannot express how difficult it is; it is the hardest thing I have ever done. Hard emotionally, hard in terms of hours spent, hard in every way. I will spare you the details. You cannot imagine it unless you have lived it.
I am able to take a time out now only because my youngest brother is here from out of town today. The middle brother told me, "When you think you are at the edge of cracking, the edge of insanity, don't go over. We can work something out".
I asked him, "which edge is that?" The edge of nervous breakdown I was at yesterday, or the one today? I keep finding new edges, new breaking points. Every day, I think that I can't go on, I think that I am already at that breaking point, but I find new breaking points every day. Every day I stand at the cliff's edge, only to find that yesterday's cliff edge was just the lip of a larger cliff.
I mention this by way of explaining that I am learning more and more the truth of this saying:
"For we live by faith, not by sight."
-2 Corinthians 5:7
By faith, not by sight, not by feelings, not by thinking. What we feel is a symptom of a problem. We need not to act on feeling but act on the problem, whatever it is. It is easy to say but hard to understand, that feelings are not nearly as important as we think they are.
In the beginning, I believed in my mind. After, I believed in my heart. Finally, I believe "in my bones": deeper than mind, deeper than heart, as deep as the soul. And I disregard my mind and even my heart, until there is nothing left but these "bones". The difference between believing in God and being a blank canvas for God to paint.
Belief counts for nothing in itself and feeling counts for nothing in itself. Belief and feeling are only steps on the road.You have to be broken, really broken, before you can get God out of your mind and into your heart. You have to be broken more to get God into your bones. Human beings are not naturally built to do this; the natural man keeps God at a distance, whether he admits to it or not. Man has an unseen primordial dread of God. You cannot admit to that which you yourself do not see or realize. It requires Light to even see the Darkness. It requires light to even know you are going the wrong way.
Then Jesus told them, “You
are going to have the light just a little while longer. Walk while you
have the light, before darkness overtakes you. Whoever walks in the dark
does not know where they are going.
Believe in the light while you have the light, so that you may become children of light.”
-John 12:35-36
A sort of metaphor: the mind is me and that; the heart is I and Thou. The bones are only Thou. The furthest distance is the mind: but even the heart is a distance.
I don't know if I can ever explain it. That for me, intellectual belief does not matter and emotions do not matter, only actuality matters. And the actuality is that I am a leaf in the wind blown by God. And that it does not matter what I think and it does not matter what I feel, it only matters what is. God is, and I am not.
