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 GIVING
THANKS FOR A LIFE REDEEMED
©
2005 by Jim Robinson
Thanksgiving.
Yes. Today, I
am thankful. Much of what I’m thankful for, though, isn’t really
all that important: my house, my job, my money. God has blessed
me indeed with these things, because not that many years ago I
had none of them, nor much hope of ever having them again. In my
alcoholism, drug addiction, and narcissistic madness, I had lost
most of my material things, becoming essentially homeless. And I
had destroyed relationships, too, my self-loathing separating me
from everyone until my soul felt no longer reachable, my sense
of the spiritual flame within me all but extinguished. Near the
end, my broken heart was barely beating.
Sixteen years
ago, existence was nothing more than a waiting, a resignation.
Thirty-four years old, a young man grown strangely old, done
with life and living. Here, really, the story should have ended.
But something else happened.
Another
night. There was really nothing different about this one. I
wasn’t in jail, or lying in the twisted wreckage of a car,
though I had experienced these things before. Nothing had
occurred to create any sort of environment for self-examination,
much less conversion; I was incoherent, past saving, really,
incapable of accessing my heart, if I had one left. Nothing now
but waiting, waiting, just one more shapeless night, one of what
seemed like millions all linked together by shadow and
emptiness, passing out, passing away . . . down once more into
nothingness . . . maybe this time will be it, maybe this time it
will end . . . drifting off again into blackness, into the
things we remember . . .
Then. Then,
instead of death, life. Instead of prison, instead of finally
succeeding in going to sleep one night and never waking, of
killing or being killed in a car or murdered by a dealer or
succumbing from the inevitable overdose, something happened.
It had little
to do with me. I had given up. Yet suddenly, in the silent hours
before dawn and the world perfectly still, I sat up wide-awake,
stone sober, as if I had never slept at all. And on this night,
in the unfurnished back room of someone’s house, lying on an old
mattress on the floor surrounded by unpacked boxes, something
changed. I don’t know what started it, or how it came to be. My
memory of the experience begins and ends with this: I awoke,
startled, instinctively listening. I could not remember having
heard anything, or recall any fragment of dream that might have
jerked me out of my stupor. Yet I was certain of some
disturbance, of something ominous in the silence pressing in on
me. And while my ears strained into the blackness, I became
aware of a presence in the room, and somewhere within me, and
before I could react I realized that it hadn’t been a sound
which had brought me back to my senses, but a force....
I felt
suddenly overwhelmed by something—Someone—and felt myself
being crushed. The truth of death slammed into me like a train,
and I burst into wrenching, agonizing sobs, as if my soul were
being torn from my chest, as if there was blood in my tears . .
. on my knees, curled over the mattress like a broken bird, my
face pressed into the sheets by a weight threatening to smother
me, the futility and longing and utter despair of my life
weighing down on me until the breath was forced from my body . .
. the lost opportunities, the waste of my gifts, the soul-deep
hunger for love, for a wife, for children, for the child within
me . . . the rush of tastes and smells, spring and flowers and
gardens and collies, pencils and chalk, grass and soil and lost
turtles and rain and clean quilts . . .winter and fireplaces and
Thanksgiving turkeys and cedar Christmas trees . . . crickets
and creeks, lightning bugs and bread & butter pickles and
childhood, the reason for being, the times of purpose and joy
and meaning and belonging, a time of being aware of life
and not fearing it . . . the tears pouring out of me like rain,
like hard, deep, crystal cleansing rain until I could not
breathe at all, could not see or hear or move, until whatever
had been haunting me came rushing out with a shudder and a gasp
and helpless hollow howling, and then died, the room perfectly
quiet. And, for the first time in many years, without moving
from the spot, I floated effortlessly into the pure and perfect
sleep of a child, to a place far beyond my broken heart.
Waking, I did
not move. I lay there, blinking dumbly at the light shining
through the window as if I had not seen such a thing in a very
long time. For the briefest of moments I wondered if perhaps I’d
finally succeeded in killing myself. Then, slowly, I began to
feel that just the opposite was true. I could no more put it
into words now than I could have then, but somehow—in a way that
had much more to do with my heart than with my brain—I knew. I
understood.
Jesus.
And though it
seemed to me as if many lifetimes had passed since I last called
out His name, I suddenly realized something that again brought
tears from a place not yet dry: He had not changed. Time
meant nothing to Him. Lying there in His arms, in the afterglow
of resurrection, I knew that in His eyes I was again a little
boy, once more a child.
His child.
* * *
Today, I’m
putting little photographs of my children in my wallet. My wife
has written on the back, marking the time. I stare at them,
sometimes—this family, this home. This life, risen from the
ashes. These are the things that matter. Even now, I often catch
myself startled by the gift, constantly awed by the unlikely
reality of them in my life. I’ll sit still (in one of those rare
moments, having small children, when it is possible to do so)
and watch them, astonished at the sheer wonder of it. They are
so much more than I deserve, and so much more than I’d ever
hoped or prayed for, that there can be only one possible
explanation for their nearness. When I’m lying in bed with my
wife, or sitting with my daughter in the backyard listening to
the songbirds, or holding the latest last hope for the lineage,
baby James, in my arms just before he drifts off to sleep, it
becomes as clear to me as it is mysterious.
They are
miracles.
And I am
thankful.
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