An Excerpt From “My Journey to Wholeness: The Sojourn Continues”
Want a real battle on your hands? Tell a Page woman that she does not work hard—and the fight is on as a never ending list of all she has done with little to no sleep is tallied. As an apple hanging from the same family tree, you cannot tell me I have not put my time in! I was living on my own at the age of 17 and since that time, I have wholly poured out my soul onto good and righteous matters! In the name of the Lord, all that I have performed was accomplished with a fervent anointing and sincere heart. Impressed? Me neither.
For the past twenty some years, I have been pretending to walk out my life’s calling. Afraid to compete, I have taken planned escape routes to avoid true achievement. In my cloud of working menial jobs; hiding out in small towns; championing other people’s projects and entangling myself in doomed relationships, I have managed to paint the facade that I am actually happy and taken good care to keep purposelessly busy!
I have to come clean! Daily I am mocked by the restless disgruntled groaning in my belly for not living my little girl dreams. The glimpses of my destiny haunt me without ceasing and I cannot find solace. I am fully aware that the Lord Himself has orchestrated the housing of books, music and businesses in the chasm of my person, but I still run from the notion that my aspirations live in corporate buildings and in global markets. I figured if I ignored these foolish thoughts long enough, I would wax old and they would leave in peace. Not so!
Every morning I awake to New Mercy staring me dead in my eyes daring me to become all the Lord smiled and predestined me to be millenniums ago! I give up! I give up, for even my body is turning on me for tolerating the delayed fulfillment of my life’s intent! I can no longer avoid the hope of the Lord’s calling on my life (Ephesians 1:18)! Uncle—I cry, Uncle!
Like a bolt of lightning striking me in my chest, I am forever changed by the next italicized words of Proverbs 13:12,
“Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life”.
Let me repeat that,
“Hope deferred maketh the heart sick: but when the desire cometh, it is a tree of life”.
These seventeen words answered why I often scaled the ledges of depression. It was not that I was slowly losing my mind! It was not that I was weak in body! It was not that my life was spiraling in shambles. On the contrary, for my intelligence is quick on its strong feet as they stand in the most awesome of places. Plainly put, the root source of my blue funks, which could paralyze me for days, was the sheer postponement of my destiny.
It is most interesting to me that Proverbs would mention the sickness of the heart instead of the body, but I get it. Heartsickness is a documented illness that ultimately takes shape in varying degrees and forms of depression. Whether classified as the mildest “low spirits” or the most extreme “melancholia”, depression, left to do its work, has the ability to debilitate the entire human body from the destruction of the emotions to the breakdown of its functional systems.
Could the deferment of our hope be the real reason many are physically and mentally sick among us?
This is a theory to strongly consider, for if we look at our communities, schools, workplaces, houses of worship and especially the hospitals and prisons, the candlelight of ambition has dimly cooled. The lack of vision is fatal! It fades natural beauty; trades swift footsteps for shiftless scuffles and chemically warps the brain from producing original imagination! Such conditions coupled with systematic laws designed to prevent success subjects the human soul to slavery.
It is not coincidental that the symptoms of underachievement are mistaken for affliction. We make appointments to sit in sterile doctor’s offices just to stand in line at a white washed pharmacy with an illegible prescription in hand to pacify our subsistence! This minimal level of survival cannot be medicated and we consciously know it! Yet, we are twistedly comforted to cope with poorly disguised mechanisms designed to sedate the mind into crippled living. Regardless of our sedation efforts, we are ever awake and incapable of escaping the fact that a life lived opposing its intention is of low generic quality. It is time to stop popping the pretty colored pills; snap out of this trance and unplug from this ungodly matrix!
I know what many of us are thinking! We think that it is too late to begin and that we do not have what it takes! Oh, but the devil is a liar, for this is the age of the unlikely hopefuls. We are not only highly suspect, but perfect prime candidates that are most apt to confound the wise! 2 Peter 1:10 affirms,
“Wherefore the rather, brethren, give diligence to make your calling and election sure: for if ye do these things, ye shall never fall”.
Who cares if many of us do not have a silver spoon jammed in our mouths—we shall never fall! Forget that we are labeled as the forgotten, the overlooked and underestimated—we shall never fall! Though we may be uncultured, unpolished and very rough around the edges—we shall never fall!
The Lord highly enlightens and anoints His people to walk upright in the offices He has placed us. Too wise to utilize a singular approach, there are a myriad of gifts, operations and administrations, specialized by the same Holy Spirit, for us to fulfill our work in the earth (I Corinthians 12:1-31)! So, as long as Philippians 1:6 tells me,
“Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ”—there is hope!
Therefore, with both fear and bravery, I take a deep breath to answer the call.