On Quarters and Unbelief

I am wonky and off-center, stressed about money and nursing a headache and cramps and a pink-eyed daughter today. I am waiting for too many things that are suspended in air, aware that nothing easy is around the corner, and I'm cranky. I am too little already to be minced up so fine, scattered to the dizzying tasks of making life in a world that is not my home.

It all feels so worldly and more than ever, I'm longing for fresh life, for a break in the rain. Out the window there is a tree tower leaning crooked, ever closer to our roof than the day before and I watch the tree suspiciously, envisioning the break line…sizing up just where and when it might crack right through the middle, splinter and split and sever and crush whatever lies beneath it. And I might be more like that tree than I'd like to believe.

I, too, am precariously leaning.

But I watch the clock in the meantime and cling desperately to absurd ideas and anxious attempts at control and count quarters, again. I click-clack on the keyboard 'cause it's my job in life and it's the only thing I know to do when I don't know what to do, when I've gotten myself in the same mess that comes around more often than I can stand to admit. I contemplate less, so much less, and don't know how it's possible at the same time.

I balance and re-balance and the numbers topple like the tree will someday. I order mistakes in my mind and fine-tune on do-overs that will never be done over. So I say it, methodically, word-by-word to myself over and over, that Word, that reminder, the instruction of what to do with our anxieties and focus this time on the part "transcends all understanding" because I am ever and always trying to make sense of the senseless, trying to give God an "out" on His promises.

If I could trust, I would know He needs none. If I could trust, I wouldn't be gut-deep in this. But my pretending has got me here, and so I grasp quarters like a lifeline and rehearse verses like a lunatic, over and over to find new life in the words, to make myself believe them.

Linking to: Imperfect Prose on Thursdays at canvaschild.com.