The Spaces Inbetween

I struggle deeply with having Hope. I have lived through a lot of hard and suffering, and I have navigated death in its various forms so many times. So I guess it’s understandable. But when I’m going through a time of great suffering, a time of “it could go either way…,” my heart immediately jumps to worst case. Unfortunately for me, that’s often because it does go the worst way. I don’t know why. But it does.

We are standing firmly in a “it could go either way” situation right now. My family and I are in this liminal place between life and death (none of us, thankfully), and my heart is grappling for some sign of “it’s fine” while plummeting into “it’s going to go the bad way.”

Death seems to have followed me closely over the years. Death of babies, death of family members, death of my father, death of relationships. It’s dark and lonely and suffocating. And, much to my biggest and deepest struggle, I have no control over it. I cannot stop it, I cannot ease it. I cannot prevent it from hurting deeply those around me. I fear death. I hate death.

I realized last night, as I experienced a very difficult moment, that death is the period. Put it at the end, and the sentence is done. Finite. Finished. But maybe I focus too much on the periods instead of remembering all the space between the capital letter and that damned period. All the letters and spaces. But what do we do when the in-between was never long enough? Instead of a full sentence, we are left with a painfully short fragment? Not enough letters and spaces. It makes the period that much more painful.

I have no answers. As I stand, raw and exhausted, in this liminal space, I feel my heart planning for the worst, expecting death’s tendrils to wrap and pull away again. I expect the period while my soul screams for a comma or semicolon.

I want it to be fine. I need it to be fine. But my heart has been programmed to wait for the worst. The wait is torture.

Will you kindly pray? We could really use a happy ending right now.