Resistor:

Have you ever known someone who has totally changed... and not for the better? Over the past month and a half to two months, I have had a fear. My fears about someone who once called me friend were realized two nights ago. I have been milling it over in my heart and my head.

My initial instinct was hurt and betrayal. I wanted to be angry, bitter, and callous. I wanted my words to cut like knives, creating the main, bloody, course of a grand buffet of retribution. However hurt and frustrated, the one emotion that penetrated them all was deep sadness, like weeping from the bones.

I don’t usually do this because I don’t like to use my blog for things like this. But I fear it is the only medium of communication by which I can be heard. I post this for the public because we all in some way can relate to regrets, mistakes, failures, and tragedy. That being said, I do formally address the broken, battered, and “dead” among us.

While bitter, I thought of all of the vengeful things to say from songs which reminded me oh so much about what I was feeling and that probably aided me in feeling the way I did. However, what you need is not another Satan.... another accuser.... what you do need is restoration and as I write this letter, I include to words of Brave Saint Saturn’s “Resistor” interleaved with my own, no motive attached words for you in hopes that they are healing words...

“Under twenty thousand tons of brick and stone,
She carries all the weight of her own world,
But somewhere deep inside,
Beneath the cartilage and bone,
Beats the battered heart of one little girl alone.
She is sweet, like sugar,
But she is bitter like the broken sugar pot.
Dad says that she could be anything she wants to be,
She only sees what she is not.”

I say words to encourage, but you tell me that I don’t know what’s going on... and you’re right, I don’t know. You have changed from the fighter I once knew. You were so strong, courageous, and bold. No, you were all those, but you were like a fortress that you let few enter, but you fought to defend those walls. Now you say that you would rather lay down arms than put up a fight. You don’t believe me and you will probably blow this off, but no matter the battle lost.... FIGHT! Fight.

“Disbeliever, underachiever,
Disconcerted with the way things look from here,
Disinclined and disinterested,
Nothing in your world seems clear.”

You say that part of you has died and I say that is a good place to start. There is something beautiful when we reach the end of OUR rope. This is a place where the infinite measure of God’s grace and the despair of our fallen humanity meet in the most beautiful kind of collision. As I have said to you many times before... there is restoration, there is healing.... there IS freedom in Christ.

“With the Blanket of Security,
And the mighty force of her own will,
Treading water in her pink pajamas,
She is treading water still.
Hopelessly hopeless,
and she is swimming,
further into the sea.
Thinking she's substandard,
While all the while,
She is beautiful to me.”

You say that you have nothing left to give and how dare I tell you differently... but that is where you’re wrong. Dare I be cliché and say that God has a plan for your life that is greater than whatever loss, despair, frustration, surrender, failure, or pit than you can see at this moment. There are moments in our lives that define us... these are the catalysts of change.

Oswald Chambers once wrote: “You can always recognize who has been through the fires of sorrow and received himself, and you know that you can go to him in your moment of trouble and find that he has plenty of time for you....If you will receive yourself in the fires of sorrow, God will make you nourishment for other people.”

“She is strong and silent,
She is blunt and shrewd,
She thinks that nobody loves her,
If she only knew,
How much we all have missed her,
We are praying for you, my little sister.”

It has been too long since you let your friends be your friends. Distance is no excuse on either end. We are just as much “here for you,” hundreds of miles away as we were when the only thing that was measured in the hundreds was the joy and laughter shared. You have it all wrong. I dare say differently because I, if I can be so bold to say, know differently. We were never meant to walk this road, this life, alone. That is why you have friends - to laugh with you, cry for you, race you for ice cream, yell at you when you’re being an idiot, and commend you when you have accomplished something grand.

“Disbeliever, underachiever,
Don't you shed another tear,
Little Sister, broken heart resistor,
It's not like that over here.”

And so, little sister, here I sit, spurring you on to higher heights, to deeper depths, to become more than you see yourself as... to live as the Heir with Christ, the Child of God, the Enemy of the devil, the Redeemed Saint, the More than Conqueror. We haven’t stopped praying for you....

Remember that no matter what happens, He is the original dreamer, the ultimate winner, guaranteed...