Graduating From Groundhog Day

There's a lot of backlog blogging I "need" to do, especially since I've written so many tentative notes to develop into potentially extensive reflections, but I just had one thought a few seconds ago as I was walking from my bedroom to the kitchen and back.

It was a reminder from God about one day when He spoke so strongly into my heart. Like I told one sister-in-Christ in Cagayan de Oro recently, God "speaks" to us all the time, but rare is the occasion when you are 110% sure that it's His "voice" you actually hear. On this short journey of mine, I can count experiencing that blessed privilege - you know, that kind of encounter Saint Ignatius calls consolation, when you are brought to your knees by the magnitude of His presence - on the fingers of one hand. This, as opposed to the times He speaks to us and we only much later realize, after much confirmation and lapse of time, that it was Him speaking. Anyway, I hope you understand what I'm saying. Better yet, I hope you've had a few of those encounters yourself.

Tonight, I was reminded about how one day, when I thought my head and heart would explode because of a confusion I never expected to find myself entangled in. I thought I'd gone through the worst anguish ever, and I actually "graduated" in my relationship with the Lord because I'd let Him enter through the wounds still raw and bleeding and heal me from within. But then, very soon after, came a whole new complication, and a whole new internal turmoil that left me holding on for dear life to my sole Consoler. I was living Bill Murray's torture in Groundhog Day, reacting the same negative way, experiencing the same bad emotions, thinking the same destructive thoughts.

We can be very adept at driving ourselves stir-crazy, and I was (am?) a poster child in that respect. But one morning, I gave God the entire wreck that was my being, and told Him to do what He would. I was too tired to put up any resistance. And He worked so beautifully - after "wrestling" with Him for a whole heart-rending night and morning, He led me to journal my current state of mind and heart, and spoke through my own fingers.

I just took a look at that entire entry written a lifetime ago; funny how it's not at all difficult to do so at this point in time. But God cut into the midst of the churning chaos with a simple declaration that "calmed the raging sea that came crashing over me": The breaking you feel is not of your heart…but of the walls around it. And, all of a sudden, everything was stilled. I knew, it was God.

Thank God that He is still and always there, even when things are not "still." And, through His grace, I hope to graduate soon from this Groundhog Day where the walls of mistrust and self-preservation and inability to love the way He loves, still continue to crumble. I pray that these constricting walls finally be made dust, if not in this life, then in the next.

No need to remember past events,
no need to think about what was done before.
Look, I am doing something new,
Now it emerges; can you not see it?
Yes, I am making a road in the desert
And rivers in the wastelands. (Isaiah 43:18-19)