What to do when everything has been stripped away

From where do you regain hope?

Hope? When all that is left is broken pieces of what used to be your life. When once filled rooms are empty shells of what used to be. When reasons for waking at the sun's rise doesn't seem to exist anymore. When cooking for four has turned into cooking for one and sometimes two. When what you believed in is up for questioning. When truth becomes fogged by greater prevailing agendas. 

Life's meaning has been taken miles down the road. You sit in silence alone with your thoughts and millions of questions. You raise your sorrows and pain to the God who promises never to leave you. To never forsake you. 

...But you feel left, you feel forsaken. You feel thrown into the wind. With humble hands filled with bits of broken hearts you ask Him to take the shards of worry, your sadness, your fear, your confusion your everything broken. In hope to make it right again.

So you sit and listen as the days embark and the hours pass. Listening and waiting for the epiphany to come. For the answer. Through this, it feels like your darkest hours. Where you meet your anguish head on. Not running from it, not hiding, not taking to bad habits or idle time wasted. For this is the time when you are gaining clarity. Perhaps not understanding, because sometimes in this life when we are deep in the valley, understanding to our circumstances does not often come until we are out. Along the hillside, or atop the mountain. But clarity into where you belong in this storybook called life. 

I have found myself getting lost in translation when trying to understand the why's and the how's. I realized I have not gained anything positive or growth worthy other than to reopen and add heaps of salt to my raw open wounds. I realized this because as I lay sobbing and hurting crying out, I was incapable of learning the reasons why I was where I stood present in this point of life. I learned through experience that no matter how hard we try to control matters, we are not always responsible for the outcome. That sometimes the system fails us. Our parents, friends, sisters...We cannot control how others will behave or their actions. It's in that very thought process that I was learning to embrace my outcome(s) by not losing sight of what I believe in or what mattered to me most. My core. My very being.

Often I find myself crying aloud wondering, why did my prayers go unanswered. Why did He answer their cries and pleads and empty promises but failed to answer mine? It's that very question in which I pause today. I am wrestling with that one. I have always enjoyed the expression "One one door closes, another one opens..."  But what does that really mean? During this dark late hour, as I sit among the low lit lamp, tucked away in this humble room, I pause and ask once more but not my last: "Why? Why me, why us, why this?" What is the purpose, the lesson, the message?"  I try desperately to cleave to the truths that seem to really speak to my heart. I hold tight to the notion that God is not finished with this chapter. That though my current circumstance may be riddled with deep confusion and pain... somehow, somewhere, at some point...justice will be fulfilled and all the countless wrongs will be made right.

For in that...I have hope.

~Thanks for reading with me :)

"Hope is the thing with wings..." ~ Helen Keller