"stories, we've got 'em"

Eventually you hit rock bottom.

You're driving to the river boardwalk after sunset, tears blinding your vision and sobs wracking your entire body.  "Beautiful Things" by Gungor is playing and you hear more about "all this pain" than you do about the "beautiful things."  You sob and pray, asking God if He'll come if you call.  If maybe this one time things could be different.

And you know that you're just a mess.  Bogged down in self-pity, there isn't much about you to deserve any true sympathy.  You've created this mess in your selfishness and bitterness and aloofness.  You deserve every bit of the pain, every single tear that falls could have been avoided had you been better.

You wish there was someone, anyone left.  Your mind goes through all the people in your life that care - there are so many - and somehow all of them with all of their selfless love and support of you through this entire mess you've made of your life are not nearly enough.  You need someone older and wiser, someone to mentor you, someone to tell you how it is, to tell you what to do, who will walk with you.  You don't know anymore.  You need someone that isn't moving away next month, someone who isn't going to leave no matter how much you scorn them.  You need a rescue and there doesn't seem to be one coming.

So you keep driving, you keep crying.

You reach the river, pull into the parking spot next to an old sketchy van with people sitting inside.  You're still sobbing, and are grateful for the cover of darkness.  You walk to the wilderness spot, the place where he proposed, the place where you've cried so many times before, the place where so much joy and so much pain has been.  Those benches that have seen it all.

And you sob.  You are coming to terms with how much of a mess you are, how much there isn't a solution.  How selfish you've been, how prideful, how haughty.  How even in all your rightness, you were always, always wrong in some way.

Always wrong.

He's not here.  He won't be here for months.  You're on your own, and this is only the beginning.  Next month they all leave.  You don't know how to follow God anymore - you follow Him still, but it's probably the most broken of followings of your life.  Always before there were answers.  Now there are few, except the haunting reminder of your selfishness, of your pride, of your bitterness.

The sobs subside, leaving as suddenly as they came.

There isn't ever a voice.

Eventually that's okay.

For today, you will keep on.