Faithful

I close the turquoise journal and slide it into the barely available slot next to all my other journals. Writing it was a process I disliked most of the time. After reading it, though, I decide it is one of my favorites, because I can see my growth and change in so many ways. The most obvious one? My handwriting changed directly after my 25th birthday, a literal expression of inner turmoil being worked through and released.

My eyes trace the colors and heights of each journal on the shelf. There's the green, thin one from my junior year of college, which is full of poetry. There's a grey one begun my second summer at Windermere, a conference center in Missouri. There's the black and white one from the summer I sold books in Wisconsin with Southwestern advantage. And there's that cream and purple one-

I pull it off the shelf, thumbing through it towards the back, looking for a specific entry. After a few moments I find it.

September 3, 2012

"My energy has been down for the past week and I feel sick no matter what." 

I pull another journal off the shelf, this one cloth bound with an owl on the front. Entry after entry describes the same exhaustion, interspersed with "Feel better" notes from concerned friends and quotes I kept to encourage myself. Memories come back. There were nights when I used to walk up and down in Hutcheson Hall stairwell, searching for sleep. There was that one time when I skipped German class, and one of my classmates told me, "Well, you don't look sick to me," and I wanted so badly to scream at him that I knew that, and that I didn't skip just because I wanted to. People prayed for me many times, and I wondered why God wasn't making himself known to me, or helping me feel better. 

I gently thump the journal on my forehead, angry with myself for not knowing what was wrong, and for letting it all go on for so long. 

And then I count them, all the journals that have these descriptions in them. Out of 18, there are 8. Almost half of my journaling experience has been colored in some way by this illness called Lyme. It's all in there: the late nights, isolation, confusion, vivid nightmares, physical stress, and despair. 

It's painful, but I make myself read through it. I listen to this girl, the one who is cheerful and trusting at the beginning, the one who is broken and defensive only a few months later, and the one who literally can't find her sanity in some entries. 

"I hate how everyone is worried about me."

"It's like something is wrong, but I don't know what."

"Father, please help me."

I ask the question I always ask, "Why?" Why did You allow this? Why do you allow me to be so alone? Why are you allowing my sisters and my Lyme sisters to go through this? Why did it have to be me that missed out on so many things because I was sick? Why?

It's the easy question to ask. It's the angry one, the visceral response to years of suffering and watching other people suffer the same thing. I feel that it is right, it is fair that I ask this question and that I receive a response.

Then I look at that line of journals and I ask another question, a quiet one, one I don't always have the strength to say out loud. "Who?"

Who was with you when you wrote that? Who knew, and never left you alone? Who knows and still loves you? Who sees and is not silent, but merely more quiet than the noise you surround yourself with? Who carries you, who provides for you, who gives you strength to write?

For His thoughts are not my thoughts, and His ways are not my ways. My doubts do not disturb Him, and my tears are no burden for Him. He sustains me in loneliness, and bears the weight of my grief. And in all my waywardness, He is faithful, always faithful. I know this because I wrote it all down.