My eyes are blinded by my tears. Psalm 88:9
My parents divorced my sophomore year in high school. Divorce has become so common that talking about it seems cliché, but that year was excruciating in ways I still can’t articulate. My sister had gone to college in San Diego, which may as well have been China as far as I was concerned, and she left me with a house full of tension and absent of voices.
When I think back on that time and try to remember what living life from my vantage point was like, all I see is fog. I remember only flashes of times when my pain spilled out suddenly and I was frozen like a deer in the headlights, shocked and confused with no idea what to do. The rest of the time, I was a shell of a person, walking around completely disconnected from me with a pervading sadness and absence of self.
I had so much to process and no ability to do it. Often times, we fail to realize the depth of our pain in the middle of it. Not until we have some distance from it are we able to see the enormity of what we were facing. I sometimes wonder why my parents didn’t have me see a counselor. I suppose I didn’t show any signs that I needed it. My grades didn’t drop. I must have smiled enough to look normal. I didn’t turn into a rebellious mess. But inside, I was dying.
I didn’t want to talk about it – I didn’t know what to say. Unlike the author of Psalm 88, my isolation was somewhat self-imposed. I had people around me who would have been glad to listen and help, but I didn’t know how to let them. I could tell my church family wanted to be there for me when they would ask me how I was doing with compassion in their eyes and sympathy in their voices. “I’m alright,” I would respond. The truth was, I was walking around with a gaping wound that covered nicely with clothes, but the pain from which was never ceasing.
At night, I would turn out my light, look out into the darkness of my bedroom, whisper, “God?” and weep. Somewhere along the way, probably about six months in, I realized this was a nightly ritual and was struck by the indication of my pain. I don’t even remember “praying” – with words. I would simply cry in the presence of God. I was blinded by my tears.
This was the one time in my day when my outer world and my inner world were congruent. The darkness surrounding me alone in my room was a physical representation of what I experienced all day in the presence of others. The psalmist poignantly articulates the pain of darkness with words. I wish I had such a voice during my times of darkness, but those are the times when words have eluded me, and my vocal chords fall silent.
On the back of our Flood flyer on Sunday was a quote from Ben Patterson. “God already knows anything we could ever say. Therefore, prayer is primarily about communion, not communication.”
Communion in the darkness. That is what I experienced. It didn’t seem to change anything. I woke up to the same reality of a broken family. I wasn’t even sure I really liked God at the time. But there, in the darkness of my bedroom and the darkness of my soul, I communed with God, and he took me in, darkness and all.
Today, if you find yourself in a similar predicament, where words seem difficult to find, remember that prayer is less about articulation and more about presence. God knows what you are trying to say anyway.
Rebecca Koo
