Unmoored

Oh Father, I am so sad.  Actually, I am not even quite sad:  I am stunned.  I am bewildered and perplexed at my own uselessness.  And I wonder where You are.  This uselessness is beyond my worst imagining.  It's so awful and shocking to my system, I have to believe, Lord, that You are somehow in it.  I look ahead to my weekend and realize that with Tom and Dom going up north, with Ivy at rehearsals all weekend, I will -- again -- have absolutely nothing to do.

This has been my worst nightmare for years.  I have looked forward to this day for years with dread, yet in the midst of my concern over this very thing, I have believed You, Father, that You wouldn't let it happen.  I believed that You would bring me into something new as this day approached.  But You haven't.  You actually haven't.  In fact, You have allowed any lingering usefulness that may have assuaged the blow of this day to also be stripped away in a surprising, an unexpected, and even a rather unkind way.  I am stunned.

Where are You?  I have to believe You are here, in this somehow.  Somehow this is Your will, for Your good purpose.

The greatest fear of my life is uselessness, and it has been even since Dom and Bea were small.  Crazy, because at that time I had many, many years ahead of me of overwhelming usefulness;  why I had that fear back then I cannot imagine.  But now I stare into the chasm of black, inky, nothingness.  I am unmoored.  I am connected to nothing, to no work, to no person who needs me, and I don't know what to do with myself.

What am I to do, Father?

My dream, whenever I would have the time to myself to think and do it, was always to write.  And now I have the time to think, the time to compose actual sentences, but ... I am afraid.  Is it Your desire that I write, Father?  Half the Christian world wants to write.  Half the entire world would kill to be able to actually be able to make money penning the insipid meanderings of their own dark and murky minds.  What makes me think anything I could write would have any more value than that?

Nothing.  There is nothing I have to say worth anything at all.  I have never wanted to write my own thoughts, Father -- only Yours.  But that's what every other Christian woman imagines herself doing too.  I see them on Facebook.  LT, KH.  They depress me because I do not want to read their words, but I do want to write, just like they are.

But without writing, I don't even have a thought for what to do with myself.  No plan at all, except to become what S is, and P, L, M, all my aunts.  Nothing.  Just sit -- eat, poop and wait to die.  And keep up with the laundry.

I think of Wile E. Coyote dashing over a cliff into the air, and then falling hundreds of yards to the ground below, usually with a boulder following him down to finish the job after gravity has done its work.  But this is worse than that.  This is like running full speed through a door and finding -- not an open chasm beneath me where, with a rush of adrenalin, I dramatically fall to my death -- but rather the inky blackness of outer space, where I...float.  Where there is...nothing.  Alone and unattached; unmoored; unneeded and unimportant.  I am completely forgotten.

Where are You, Father?  I thought You would be here.