Like a Behbeh

First post of the year, and new decade :)

where to even begin? To say that I have changed since my last post, let alone since my creation of this blog is an understatement. I started this year as not just a changed person, not just a different person, but most importantly a new Lauren.

As 2009, easily one of the darkest years of my life, came to its bitter end, I found myself lost. Imprisoned by my stubborn and decaying self reliance, and fully aware of the desolation of my mental state, I found myself angry, hurt, embarrassed, and confused. More than anything else though, I felt I had been consumed by the apathy which had been the catalyst to my condition. In my selfish masochism, I shut everyone out, eagerly anticipating the numbing silence of my solitude, and it was there, in the darkest hour of my depression, that I finally found.... myself.

For the first time in my life, I found my self hopeless. I thought that all my struggles were hopeless, thought my battles, my problems, and my pains were hopeless, and apathetically surrendered to the anesthetizing redundancy of the cyclical nature of that constantly reoccurring epiphany, until I was delivered a lethal one. Rather than a lack of hope in each of these individual situations, rather than a disdainful pessimism, rather than all I expected to be the source or cause or a place to point any of my fingers, I found instead, a deficit, a complete and utter lack of hope in general. While some epiphanies wound you with the severity of their validity, that one delivered a lethal blow.

It took me finally understanding hopelessness and finally giving up completely for me to allow God to pull me up and pull me out. Forgetting all restraints I let myself fall, and as He has always said, and as I have always known, He caught me in my freefall. He saved me in my plummet , and he carried me in all of my deadweight. Hope you asked for? Truth? Answers, purpose, life, you cried?

"Here it is," He said.

And it was in the silent stillness of true surrender that I could grasp the lifeline before me. Broken, hurting, fragile, and perfectly imperfect, I nakedly accepted the vulnerability of shedding the binding facade of foolish self reliance, and finally, being clothed in the true, forgiving, and fulfilling being of God, I am dead no more. Lauren Newborn, newly reborn again. :)

Happy New Year!