“It’s been a rough morning,” I say to the Lord. “I can’t seem to find my place. God, I’m mad at you.  I’m mad.  No reason. I just am.”

“I know,” he answers. “I knew before you did.”

I keep looking at my hands. They look so old – the hands of an old woman.  Wrinkled, flabby, full of age spots. They look so old and tired, and I hate to look at them.  I lotion them, slowly run my fingers along the veins and stretch out the skin to make it smooth. Then it pops back into wrinkle city as soon as I lift my finger, showing years of use and abuse.  I’m mad.

Lord, I read a word in a devotional book this morning to praise you and give thanks. But the praise and the thanks are stuck in my throat. They come out in low guttural moans of angst, complaint, and wordless pain. There’s my praise. That’s the most I can seem to muster today.

“Truth sounds like that,” he says. “There was a time when you would stop this that you’re feeling and saying and put on the façade you think I expect from you and begin to just say, praise you, thank you, blah, blah, blah.  That would lift your spirits and then you would go on about your activity, casting aside the real stirring that’s in you.  That’s not really praise, not of a true heart. I’d rather hear the groaning.”

“And then what?” I ask.  “So I groan and feel sad and angry.  Then what?”  These days I’m a little stumped, a little confused.  It used to be that I would just begin to confess it as sin and the flesh and not me and cast it on the Lord and confess I’m free of it.  But what is that about?  I don’t think that’s what is called for. Is it, Lord?

“Look at it deeper,” the Lord says.  “Look into it, like looking into your reflection in a lake.  What do you see?”

“I see I am tired, and I feel lost.  I see these abused old hands fit me – spotted and wrinkled, with the elasticity of hope sucked out.  Where did it go?”

“It went south, as they say. It all went south. The hope you bought was pulled off a shelf, pre-packaged. It was the descriptions, the dreams, the mantras, the beliefs about what is good and desirable and what to look forward to in the future.  Is that your hope?  Nah. You’re already seeing now that this package will not satisfy you.

True hope – hope that is yours – is born out of pain, out of grief, out of letting life touch you and cut into the most tender flesh of your heart.  Hope knows that you do not have to pretend those pains and disappointments don’t exist, or that they don’t matter.  It is owning them, feeling them, naming them.  If you do not first own them and name them, then you cannot leave them and move away from them. You will carry them with you, and they will snuff out hope.

You’re angry because you’ve not separated yourself from the experiences and feelings that rob you of hope.  You bought your package of hope because it was cheap. It did not require much from you to pick it up off the shelf, saying, ‘This will do. This is me.’  As is so often said in the world, you get what you pay for. That package was a knock-off, not the real thing.

Stop. Let the groans come and tell you from whence they come. Let them tell you what it is that you carry within you that daily cuts away a sliver of hope and disfigures your dreams. Speak it. Name it.”

“Lord, it’s the not knowing who I am, because that person was never allowed to take form. Rather, it constantly morphed into what I thought was expected of me. And now, without expectations drawing me, I don’t know how to perform. I don’t know what I’m to do, how I’m to act.”

I suppose that means I have a clean slate. If that’s all there is, then I can just let it be me, do it my way, dance the night away. . . sorry, I just felt a string of song titles line up.  Back to the task at hand – the groanings. They say what I thought was me is no more. What is me will now come forth.  It’s time to show up and see who I am. As that becomes more clear, these groanings will become articulate in beauty and in truth.

So Lord, thank you. I praise you for this moment, this conversation, this enlightenment and this hope.  I do give you thanks. I sincerely give you thanks.