Let Me Pull Myself Up by My Bootstraps
I have been trying very hard to find a friend that loves at all times. I know that if anyone out there is in this same quest, I will never be their go-to person. Why? I don’t love at all times. I don’t love other people all the time, and I certainly don’t love myself all the time.
There have been days when I wished self-destruction. Was it love? I looked around and saw the stars in the darkness of the night twinkle once, only once, and disappeared. When I looked around I saw only shades of darkness. “What should I do with this faceless companion called night,” I asked myself. That’s when I felt like becoming one with it. Was it love to want to cease to exist? Maybe, but maybe not.
My search for a perfect friend has left me with an image of a beautiful countryside where no one but myself exists. I walk up and down the remote paths of loneliness, seeking for something I have lost, a version of myself that used to be happy, determined, and friendly.
I found him. I found him battered and bruised by circumstances beyond his control. I picked him up, shook him, and tried to revive him from his stupor. I failed.
I found him in a cave with eerie sounds of discouragement and frustration, hands and feet shackled by a lack of faith in his own abilities. He was blindfolded with indecision and confusion, and his garbs were rags of his own failures. I tried to help him. I failed.
I found him drenched in the rain of sorrow and affliction, self doubt, regrets, pain, lots of pain. He had become one with his suffering. I found it impossible to separate him from everything that kept him from becoming his best self. I couldn’t help him, because I was him, and he was me, and all my efforts felt like pulling myself up by my bootstraps.
Then I met Jesus. He came to me in the pages of Matthew 5 of the Christian Bible. The words he spoke were life to me. He healed me. The battles of life rage on, but I now have peace.
