mourning.

C.S. Lewis once wrote:

"To love at all is to be vulnerable.  Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken.  If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal.  Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.  But in that casket - safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change.  It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable."

Has God created me a mourner?  One whose heart is easily torn, who sees brokenness more vividly?  Or am I just more surrounded by it than I ever have been before?

What I do know is that I often hold in sadness and let it all out at one time.  Last week I had a breakdown.  I cried harder than I have in a long time, because of little things that all piled up and then was topped off by my car not starting.  When a brand new car that you bought only a year ago just doesn't start, when it's the biggest financial investment you've ever made and it just... stops working, well that was just too much to handle on top of everything else.

And then something actually big came up and I lost it.  I ended up driving to Green Bay to spend a little time with my family - to heal, to process, to detox.

So put on the full armor of God, for we have an already-defeated foe.