I’ve probably overdrafted three times since I’ve been banking, and it’s always been a horrifying realization; I’m financially unstable, therefore incompetent in all areas of life, and obviously so.  Perpetually so.  Desperately so.  This time I’m still feeling sick about it, counting up all possible sources of income and knowing I can’t do anything until Thursday, but I’m ok.  God met me today on my back porch, after a day of very dim thoughts, occluded inner passageways, some giving-up, and that means that I must still be living in eternity.  Somehow, and so undeservedly.

I wish I knew something.  I wish I had control over something.  I’ve spent days drifting back to the place I tend toward, over and over, of all this sadness.  Cave-living of a kind, forgetting the Eternal Yes.  Ironic that I put that Lewis quote up there, not even realizing I needed to absorb fully its force … oh I need that force.  Some days are so poverty-stricken.  Sometimes I want so, so much to know that something I’m doing matters, or that I am helping in some way.  But the porch, see how I drift, I went out on the porch after the long, long afternoon and

there was a mackerel sky spread out overhead, forward from where the sun was setting back behind the trees all lacy with their tiny final leaves.  Marshall walked up with a guitar in his arms,  stood under those clouds and leaves and played “Naked As We Came,” Iron and Wine.  Patterns of intricacy, delicate things alive and being almost more beautiful than I could stand.  I had a moment of knowing how the Lord lives with us: secretly, with more forgiveness than we can understand.  But now I’m poor again and very lonely.  Oh the desires of the heart.  How could anything but God fill this hugest of vacancies, honeycombed and stinging with every echo of the thousands of echoes.