The Shadow of the Bright and Clear

Have you ever felt like all you are free to do now is to sit back and let life happen? Just let it drift on by like so many toy boats in so much water? All because the thing that, rightly or wrongly, made your world keep spinning has itself spun out of your life?

What if you lost it so long ago, and you kept searching, hoping, dreaming, begging, bargaining with God or with yourself. "Let me find it Lord, I'll do anything..." Until you find it again and everything feels just about complete.

But what if you've felt it slipping away for a while? Clawing its way back out of your life, slithering out. Creeping. Until all you have left is a mere shadow dancing its shadowy dance on the white plaster of the wall behind you, projecting dimly what was once so bright and clear.

But what if you don't want the shadow? What if the shadow makes you feel week and vulnerable because you poured so much of yourself into the bright and clear incarnation? Poured so much out, and now its stuck with the bright and clear, and you are left with the shadow. The shadow of the bright and clear, the shadow of who you were, and the shadow of what you poured out from yourself. The shadow of what you gave.

And now you feel so small.

Lonely.

Scared.

What if you don't know how much more you can take? Would you explode? Or would you simply fizz out like coke-a-cola going flat, because there's not enough of you left to combust? And that being said, would you be missed half as much as everyone tells you you would be?

Sometimes you just need to believe someone somewhere would miss you if one day you just weren't around. Sometimes you just need to believe that for someone, somewhere, love actually works the way it was designed to. Sometimes you have to believe that there's an escape from pain that's so much better than even more pain.

And maybe that would be God, if you weren't too scared to trust Him. If for once you would actually believe all the things you say you do and stop being a hypocrite. Stop lying to yourself. Stop seeing in yourself everything you hate in others. If you could not only listen to, but actually believe the things people say about you... Then you would be strong. You'd genuinely be as strong as you act. It wouldn't be an act just to show people who they need you to be.

If you could let everything go... Then you would be free.