May it Be Blessed: An Orthodox journal

3AM confrontation with the enemy. The mind starts up again spinning out variations on “I can’t do this.”

All the trial and error all day long, thrashing around adjusting my positioning to ward off the worst stabbing pain doesn’t really work and leaves me with my face buried in a pillow day and night, locked into a distressing position.

The patterns of unhelpful thoughts and feelings used to be a long term project to be aware of but more in the background of everyday life. And the secular approach to all that was completely different without the ultimate healing power of Christ.

Now it’s a matter of bringing myself to the humility of prayer that nips those patterns in the bud, as I constantly renew my relationship with God all day long.

That never even entered my mind before as a possible way of life for a “regular” person like me. Now that it becomes imperative, that is what I bring myself to over and over again all day long.

Expectations of what I’m capable of or not capable of, or what is reasonable or not for such a regular person to go through, for how long – all expectations go into the purifying fire.

Whatever is my experience right now, if it’s a pattern that is not from God, “even this” goes in for the “treatment” of prayer, taken up into the arms of divine protection. I am discovering that no problem or pain is too far gone to come under that protection. And I forget and often fall, of course.

But that’s the work, to keep reining in all the deluded thought content so it comes under the command of the true protection. This ongoing work requires my vigilance to first recognize and then refuse to indulge the darkness, and renew my commitment to God’s law.

No wonder we pray constantly. The healing treatment is always being provided, I’m sure, but I need to constantly reengage with it.

It becomes not just a matter of rising to the occasion to take necessary bitter medicine. But being so unrelentingly pushed into this way of life of opening to the fullness of God’s love – how could I ever complain. Well, I do. And get up and thrash around a bit and bring myself back to the work of love again and again.