When Commitment Is Wrong

“To be weary and heavy laden is to have the highest fitness to receive that rest which Christ alone can give.”

~William Law, A Collection of Letters

Upon times of sharp distress, where life is somehow betwixt in a flux of numbness, change being the very definition of change, there is a probing temptation, yet no justification, for making commitments that will bind.

Commitment, at such a quavering time, would be to turn from reality into a fantasy of hellish discord; a road with which one could only sensibly turn back upon. Yet, many that have travelled such a road have continued to beat its harrowing path, where regret—and remorse, underpinning—resounds.

There is a way through hell and the making and breaking of commitments—from that space—is not, generally, the way there.

A Process for Rest

At such a place all commonly find themselves at least once: The Place of Disconsolation. It is the rabbit warren of fuming madness; a bridge to nowhere; the place where time stands still for all the wrong reasons.

Life as it was, for myriad reasons, has ended; a new, perhaps transitional, period we are now transported to. “Such is life,” people might flippantly tell us—but we know differently. (This, in the midst of it, is no life at all.)

At such a place—one beyond recognition of the Divine—there is no rest unless we take leave of absence, venturing into the heart of God, which is beyond perplexing self-thought, the ravages of the world, and past and present dilemmas.

Here, as we find ourselves suffering at fear, for anxiety, in a deep depression, for however long, and for whatever reason, we must rest—finding that rest which subsists in God alone as it prevails to us, for us, and through us; in ways that are relevant and meaningful to us, alone.

God is personal when he meets us here.

Hell Is Not a Place for Making Commitments

Notwithstanding a previous article, The Sword of Love—an exhortation to commit to the processes of life—one place we do not commit, unless God makes it palpably plain that to do so would be good, is in the location of a living hell—where our minds and hearts are not of one, or sensible, accord.

The only sensible commitment might be that commitment to not commit; to be free simply to bathe in the powerful Presence of the Spirit indwelling us, at The Peace That Transcends Understanding.

Wisdom finds itself acknowledging such times of scant regard to sense much like we might answer a difficult question; it utters the response, “I don’t know, and may never know, and that’s okay.”

Commitments for the making are designed for the sensible mind.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.