Falling asleep in Delilah's Lap
A colloquy on weakness
Hast thou sought joys in some creature comfort?
Look not below God for happiness;
fall not asleep in Delilah’s lap.
Let God be all in all to thee,
and joy in the fountain that is always full.“A Colloquy on Rejoicing.” The Valley of Vision. Banner of Truth, 2014.
I’ve been thinking through (or feeling through?) the trauma the last year has caused us all. Trauma we can already name and place somewhere along the timeline of 2020, and trauma still sitting in our brains and bodies we haven’t discovered yet. Trauma has to be the correct word, right? Some people probably believe trauma can only be experienced in abusive or violent situations, terrible accidents, father wounds, etc. Some people are probably tired of the word being used so frequently in the last several months to describe the state we’re in. I assume many people flat-out don’t like the word, thinking it too grave, too emotional, too weak. Personally, I need to be able to review the last year and give a name to how I feel, or I’ll only keep feeling it. I’ll keep sleepwalking through my days trying not to feel anything.
That’s the tricky thing about trauma that gives way to depression: you feel desperate, ominous dread all the time, while simultaneously thinking it’s the baseline of human emotion, so at the end of the day, you assume you simply feel nothing. It sits there with you, germinating like a seed. It grows slowly, quietly, until it becomes another thing you subconsciously learn to live with, like lack of sleep or lower back pain.
Another word that comes to mind when thinking about the why of this trauma, is displacement, but I’m certainly not equating my circumstances to a refugee crisis or the physical effects of a natural disaster in this context. The first and simplest definition of the word is “the moving of something from its place or position.” It’s hard to not feel like everything has been displaced over the last year. In the course of a couple of months, life was interrupted, changed, rewired. Many of Alison’s long worked-on and lovingly nurtured projects stopped short, our community was reduced to a computer screen, jobs were lost, stabilizing routines were thrown out of whack, we sanitized our groceries, stayed away from each other, and activated survival-mode. On top of it all there were very public murders, riots, and protests. “Normal” was displaced.
The first few weeks seemed ok. Some of us tried to view a state shutdown as a mini-vacation. We stayed up late, drank wine on a Tuesday (a Tuesday!) and almost enjoyed getting to stay home. We tried to convince ourselves this temporary interruption was what society needed to slow down, stop and smell the roses, quit navel-gazing, etc. But weeks went by, then months. More wine on a Tuesday, more staying up late, more getting out of bed late. Our internal clocks got thrown off and the nervous laughter towards the whole situation turned into actual worry. People died, then more people died, then more.
I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t handled the last year well. I wish I could say different. I’m 34 years old and by some miracle I had never faced true anxiety and depression until around April of 2020. When it decided to show up, I had no clue how to handle it. I jogged a lot. It didn’t work. When the pressure came I was shown how weak I am. I ate too much, drank too much, and ran away from God. Anxious days gave way to restless nights and troubled dreams.
Even now, I think some of us still haven’t decided to deal with just how difficult it’s been. Looking back over things, I could judge my response to trauma with harshness and leave it at that, focusing on my failures and promising to do better next time. In light of some of my choices maybe that judgement would be fair, because when fear surrounded me, creature comforts called and I answered. I fell asleep in Delilah’s lap. The world outside was scary, but it was warm in her bedchamber and I was a little drunk and very tired.
Or, I could choose another path when reviewing my year. I could push back against the false gospel of self-sufficiency and choose to embrace my emptiness, not shame it. If I allow myself, I could come to Christ with open, empty hands and ask him to fill them. In examining the last year, I see my weakness, but I also see now that grace was present with it, in it, next to it like a close friend. In walking through darkness I learned how I’m bent to respond to it, and how my response didn’t work - this is one of grace’s lessons. If I believe the gospel, then I must believe Christ knows how hard it is to be human, and that I am His beloved. I cannot lose his love, even in my weakness.
We aren’t out of the woods yet with the pandemic and interrupted life, but lately I’ve been trying to make better choices to get through it. I’ve learned that I don’t need to run from my weakness by ignoring it, or numbing it with other things. There’s a chance that unlike Samson, we can come out of this with our strength intact and our hair only matted and messy from sleep, not shaved off entirely.
Here’s to waking up.
-GW
A few resources that have helped me on the road: