When God Does Not Repair the Past but Claims the Wound

Though He slay me, yet will I trust in Him.

Job 13:15

What Remains When Everything Falls Away

Lord, I feel estranged from my own life. The first half of it feels like another man lived it. I look back and see anxiety running the show. Desire unformed and frantic. A heart chasing what promised relief rather than what could bear weight. I see immaturity not as a moral failure but as a lack of grounding. I did not know how to live inside myself. I did not know how to stay.

Even when I came to You it was not clean. Grace met disorder. Calling met confusion. I brought into the Church a life that had never been shaped, and I learned slowly and painfully that zeal does not heal what formation alone can touch. I hurt people. I let real relationships slip away through fear and stupidity. I applied myself fiercely to what could never last and then wondered why it vanished so quickly.

When I sensed Your call I tried to answer, but I see now how divided my motives were. I was drawn by what seemed to promise fulfillment the most. Either being chosen by a woman or being chosen by the Church. Perhaps I believed I was not enough to keep anyone from leaving. Perhaps celibacy felt safer than intimacy because rejection there could be sanctified. I chose what was hardest not because You asked it, but because I did not trust myself to offer anything unless it hurt.

I forced myself into forms that did not match my nature. I drove myself academically. I overworked. I sought recognition not as vanity but as proof that I could overcome what felt broken in me. I tried to put parts of myself to death in order to survive rather than offer them to You. But nothing dies cleanly. What is buried returns altered and more dangerous. I learned that repression does not become offering just because it is baptized.

Ashamed of instability, I chose fidelity even when it became absurd. Having known chaos, I clung to structure. Having failed others, I tried to become reliable at any cost. I sought the most demanding training because I believed difficulty would purify intention. I entered the depths of psychology to understand fear and anxiety and to walk with others in their hells. I wanted to save others from the traps I fell into. I wanted not to be alone.

I saw clearly how mediocrity and worldliness hollow out religious life, and so I clung to the Fathers and asceticism not to escape the world but to learn how to stand upright within it. I wanted what was real. I wanted what could not be taken away.

And yet everything I built collapsed. Again and again. A community that held my life for decades rejected the very thing that had given me breath. What was most alive in me was treated as a problem. I left not in triumph but in grief. I went looking for others who might recognize what I loved and found closed doors and polite indifference. I woke up one day and I was sixty.

I have a freedom now that I did not have before. My prayer is deeper. My heart is quieter. But everything familiar has been stripped away. The solitude I longed for arrived through loss rather than choice. I am not building anything.

I remain with one life, day after day.

This is the measure of my life now.

I do not want what came before. I do not want to go back. But I am tired of waiting. The only words I hear are humility, silence, patience. They feel less like counsel and more like the shape of my confinement, though I do not yet see its freedom.

So tell me, Lord, do You work any good through this. Through my failures and infidelities. Through what I broke. Through what others broke in me. Through the egos and blindness and refusals that closed every door.

Is this the end of usefulness

or the stripping away of usefulness.

If there is fruit here it is hidden from me. If this is obedience it feels like burial. If this is purification it is slow and unannounced. I am not asking for restoration. I am asking whether You still recognize me in this quiet erasure.

I place the whole tangled story before You without defense. What I chose wrongly. What I chose out of fear. What I chose out of longing. What was done to me. What I did to others. I cannot separate the threads anymore.

If You can make prayer out of this, then let it be prayer. If You can make love out of this, then let it be love. If this small life is enough, then teach me to consent to its smallness without resentment. I have nothing left to prove. I only ask that this broken offering not be refused.

I Was There Before You Broke

And there is a pause.

Not the pause of indifference

but the kind that presses on the chest.

The kind before thunder.

The kind before a stone is rolled away.

Then the voice does not rise from within you.

It does not flatter your insight.

It does not soothe your anxiety.

It does not analyze your past.

It comes from elsewhere.

It comes as it came to Job.

Out of the whirlwind.

You ask if I work any good through this.

Tell me where were you when I laid the foundations of your life.

When I shaped your heart with its hunger and its fear.

When I allowed desire to awaken before wisdom so that you would learn you are not self-made.

When I permitted you to choose wrongly so that you would learn you are not self-saving.

You speak to me of disorder as though it surprised me.

You speak of failure as though it escaped my sight.

You speak of loss as though I were absent when the doors closed.

I did not watch from afar.

I was there when you reached for what could not hold you.

I was there when you tried to become what you thought would make you safe.

I was there when you buried parts of yourself instead of offering them to me.

I was there when you stood faithful in places that no longer gave life.

I was there when what you loved was rejected and named a problem.

Do you think I did not know what this would cost you.

You ask whether this waiting is fruitless.

Tell me.

Was my own waiting in Nazareth fruitless.

Were the years unseen wasted.

Was the silence a failure of mission.

You ask whether burial can still be obedience.

Look at me in Gethsemane.

I did not feel purpose there.

I did not feel clarity there.

I felt abandonment and fear and the terror of obedience that offers no reassurance.

I asked that the cup pass.

It did not.

You ask whether hiddenness means erasure.

Look at me stripped and lifted before the world.

Look at me misunderstood by friends and mocked by the faithful.

Look at me accomplishing nothing visible.

Look at me saving everything.

You want a word that fills the emptiness.

I do not fill it.

I have chosen it.

I do not return you to what was.

I do not explain what collapsed.

I do not justify the egos that harmed you or the choices that wounded others.

I do not rewrite your story into something impressive.

I claim it.

I claim the years that taught you fear.

I claim the desires that frightened you.

I claim the ambition that tried to survive by excelling.

I claim the fidelity that held even when it no longer made sense.

I claim the solitude that arrived through loss rather than design.

I claim the care of one life as holy ground.

You ask if this life is enough.

Enough for what.

For admiration.

For legacy.

For being remembered.

Or enough for me.

I did not call you to be complete.

I called you to be mine.

Do not ask me to restore what had to die.

Do not ask me to make sense of what can only be surrendered.

Do not ask me to speak loudly where I have chosen to remain quiet.

Remain where you are.

Not because you have failed.

But because I am here.

This waiting is not punishment.

It is consent.

This silence is not absence.

It is communion.

This narrowing is not the end of your life.

It is the place where it finally becomes undivided.

You have nothing left to prove.

That is not loss.

That is freedom.

Stay.

Let yourself be carried.

Let your life be small enough to be held.

I am not finished.