For Her

I'm still kinda reeling from my phone call last night with a friend who I haven't heard from in a year or so. We became close, years ago, when I was living in her town (see, it was never my town because I had a feeling I was not going to be living there forever).

She and I are nothing alike and yet very much kindred spirits only because I care about family and my relationship with God with the same intensity she does. She called me last night because she was at the end of her rope. I loved how she did not even try to make small talk and try to catch up with me first before she plunged into the details of the agony and the trial she was going through- all because of a child, one of her children. It might as well have been one of mine- that's how I groaned inside over what her daughter was going through.

We talked for a long time. There weren't any answers to be given, or any recognized solutions, except the request I made that she try to talk more with her daughter about what the root of her pain was.

At the root of it all, at the bottom of it all- that's what we have to get to. We have to. Because if we never get down to the deep dark dirt of what we're really reacting to or running from, we don't know anything except that we are flailing and falling and nobody knows why.

I told her I would pray. And I don't mean the kind of prayers that are neat and nice and sweet. I mean the kind of prayers where you are warring, travailing, beseeching God, not letting Him forget for a teeny tiny second that we need His help, that we have to have His help, and that there must be a way for Him to make a way...for her.