"See, I am doing a new thing! Now it springs up; do you not perceive it? I am making a way in the desert and streams in the wasteland."

 -- Isa 43:19

I received this from my other daughter, Bethany, last night, completely out of the blue. 

I was just thinking about this lately and I felt like I should tell you. I know you feel like you made a lot of mistakes, but all of us are extremely kind people and that's because of you. Even though you've had bouts of anger and whatnot, you've always had a really kind spirit and taught all of us that. Any time I go out of the way to be nice to someone or have compassion, it's because that's what you taught me. 

And indeed, I am very proud of how kind my children are, and how brave. If I were to choose what to be remembered for, if I were asked to say what it was I tried most to teach my children to be, it would be this. Kindness and courage. Perhaps I succeeded in something after all.

"Nalgron was speaking of courage, of honor, of prudence, of thoughtfulness in giving and punctillio in keeping your word, of following your heart, of setting and unswervingly striving toward a high, romantic goal, of self-honesty in all these things but especially in recognizing your aversions and desires, of the need to close your ears to the fears and naggings of women, yet freely forgive them all their jealousies, attempted trammelings, and even extremest wickednesses, since these all sprang from their ungovernable love."

-- Fritz Leiber

What happened to the world in which things like this were written and published? It wasn't all that long ago, but it seems like another age of the earth. And it's not even great literature; it's pulp fiction. 

"Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and above all, those who live without love."

-- Albus Dumbledore 

So I've been, rather obviously, in a very bad place. I've been in a pit that I just couldn't climb out of: a deep, dark pit with steep, smooth, slippery walls. I've been under a weight of hopelessness and despair so heavy that I couldn't stand up. I've felt like a dementor had sucked out my soul.

Yesterday morning, God did another of those healing miracles that I've been experiencing here and there. I don't know exactly why it comes in pieces like this, instead of one big miracle that changes everything, but I suspect that it has to do with me, and Him in me, working through things, layers, like Eustace and the dragon-skin. Anyway, I woke up, I felt His presence, and my soul just felt whole in a way I don't know that I've ever experienced before. It's difficult to describe. It wasn't exactly that I felt joy, or peace, or hope even. Just like I was able to go on, where before I hadn't been. I guess maybe I can describe it as being like my soul was a broken leg that I can finally begin to walk on again. It's not completely healed: it still hurts. But I can put weight on it. I felt like living, and like I could. I felt like doing things. I felt like working. I felt like exercising. I felt like moving forward.

I picked up my phone, while still sitting in bed, to tell someone, the first person who it occurred to my heart to want to share such news with; but before I could even reach it I received, once again, bad news. Terrible, heartbreaking, soul-crushing news. And it did indeed break my heart. But it didn't crush my soul this time. I still feel whole. In pain, but whole.

It's like my whole life has been me being knocked flat on my ass by Fate, or Satan, or Zeus, or whoever the hell it is that has been hounding me. As a friend said recently of my life, "One unbelievable calamity after another." And every time I think I've been hurt as badly as it's possible to be hurt, someone finds a way to hurt me even worse. Then I think, "Well this is as bad as it can possibly get." But nope, there comes another one. And I've stood up, and collected myself, and started putting one foot in front of the other, and eventually I start to get a little bit down the road, and then he sees me and comes running back over and says, "NO! You are NOT getting up." And knocks me back down again. Knocks me hard; bone-crunching, organ-jarring, teeth-flying, internal bleeding hard. Like the giant in that fairy-tale I wrote a few years ago: just so strong and hits so hard that you simply can't believe it. And harder and harder each time, to try and teach me a lesson, not to try again. But fuck him. 

"Death is but crossing the world, as friends do the seas; they live in one another still. For they must needs be present, that love and live in that which is omnipresent. In this divine glass, they see face to face; and their converse is free, as well as pure. This is the comfort of friends, that though they may be said to die, yet their friendship and society are, in the best sense, ever present, because immortal."

-- William Penn