Hope out of the loneliest experience

Some days, weeks and months become etched into the folklore of our lives.

The week of 4-10 October 2003 is one among two of the most significantly harsh lived experiences that have been carved into my psyche thus far.

Each day had its own memorialised narrative. Each 24-hour period profound in the breaking of me, which ultimately had the effect of remaking me, not that I knew anything but the despair of these occasions at the time.

The loneliest experience of my life was moving the few belongings I had left out of my parents’ house and into the company vehicle I had at the time and driving to the dingy little flat I had rented.

This little flat, for me, on 10 October 2003,
had the presence of death about it.
There was no life within its walls.
It was a spiritually vacuous place.

I stayed there six months,
though many nights I could not sleep there.

It was a real and present reminder that my life at that time had completely imploded. It was a Friday, and I shifted alone. It was two days after I had a calamitous breakdown that felt as if our worlds were ending, yet there was no sympathy from whom sympathy was sought.

It was a day after my father had had surgery that would push his mental health to the brink over the coming months. It was one of those rock bottom times that all families endure. Even after 15 years it is hard to comprehend just how hard that time was.

It was the loneliest time of my entire life. I truly don’t know how I held on, other than through the receipt of love that was poured into me, much of which came from unexpected sources.

What inspires me about my own story is that there were myriad times I wanted to give up. There were occasions when I seriously considered ending it all. I have massive empathy for anyone who has been on the receiving end of this kind of hell, whatever the outcome.

This period was merely the beginning of a long and tiresome campaign for recovery. It was a crusade to recover the concept of normal. And it took years. Perhaps in some ways it is an ongoing work.

But the loneliest time of my life came when I felt completely abandoned and forsaken. And yet I know God did not take me there without reason, for as I look back I can see him there, I just couldn’t see it at the time.

15 years ago, this week, I cannot believe the contrast between that life, then, and this life, now, even amid losing Nathanael in 2014. I could not have contemplated then being in the situation I am in now.

And that is life.

It is in the loneliest seasons that great change is birthed,
the sort of change we would never choose,
but the sort of change that inevitably chooses us,
and when we move with it, great is the transformation in us.

We never think we have what it takes to make it through such change.

If we are wise even though we are weak, however, we will rely on God, the provision of caring companions he provides to get us through, and our own increasing resources of resilience.

If only I go back there to that time, to sling that heavy bed on the roof rack, and how it took every ounce of my physical strength to do it, and how I did so in tears, I am thankful for that version of me that kept going.

If you are in that place now, or you know someone at their rock bottom, be encouraged, and be an encouragement. The night is darkest just before dawn, and the sun will rise on your day soon.