Powerless

I'm finally going to try to post something, although I warn you that I'm not feeling the least bit up to the task.  I fear that my ability to string two thoughts together in written form is currently buried beneath a thousand other things - thoughts, feelings, worries, half-finished prayers, anger, sadness, regret, confusion, heartache, panic, pain, hopelessness, fear. 

I don't know how to explain what Scott and I are feeling right now, don't even know if there are words big enough and powerful enough to capture our present reality.  I can only say that there is no escape.  Not in laughter, not in a date-night movie, not in a good book, not in a beautiful day spent with loved ones and happy kids and flowers and sun.  Not even in sleep.  Especially not in sleep. 

No escape. None. 

My Bible, my cute little purple Bible, has become my safety and my life.  I find myself carrying it around with me throughout the day, needing desperately to keep it near.  Purse, couch, van, table, bed.  I panic when I cannot remember where I left it.  Frantically searching, scrambling around in near tears until it's been found, until it's once more in my possession, once more alive and vibrating in my hands.  I feel the weight of it like almost never before: a physical weight, not an imagined one...giving testament to the enormous truths within that describe both the heaviest of life's burdens and the entirety of life's hope.

And yet, so often I feel powerless to open it.

Nothing has changed with our son since I last wrote, except perhaps that he seems to be giving up on himself and is even more defiant.  He is still a volcano biding his time until his daily eruption, which comes faithfully with little or no provocation.  He seems unable to equate any consequences as having come from his own choices, believing that everything is happening to him and not because of him. 

After being discharged from the inpatient program last Tuesday, he held it together for all of a day and a half before raging again on Thursday and being admitted to the day program again on Friday.  And after refusing his medication and threatening to bite me "like you've never been bitten before" (don't worry, he was restrained at the time), we checked him in as a full-time patient again at about midnight last night.  On our daughter's birthday.

And so life goes on for us.  Calmer for the moment, yet with a piece missing that is our eldest son.  I cling to my husband, who clings to me, and together we cling to God and cry out for His mercy.  And we laugh, and we pray, and we live, and we love our kids and play with them, all the while hoping that they don't notice that our smiles fall short of our eyes.

And I carry my Bible with me.  Although there are many of these days that I can't bring myself to read a single verse, when I can't process the letters that are spilling from the pages and can't even begin to drink deeply of its truths, I trust that God will give me exactly what I need. 

I am powerless, but He is not.

Please continue to pray for us.