“It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it … so I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent.” 
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

Matt,

Your 29 years have marked you as a man who fights and has been wounded for Love’s sake. Your face has become cut with the determination to live in what is true or be burned at it’s stake taking what purging is yours so that you may know joy and life and pass on the same. The futility against which you push will one day give itself over. It will die and does die one evil at a time. Your courage to care, to hope, and to live against all that evil has perpetrated in this world bears witness to God and the life which flows from Him.

I love you and carry you as a father carries his son- in my arms, on my back, and in my soul- it will always be, and this brings me immense joy. You are your name, “Gift of God”.

I love you, Dad

Batter My Heart
 
Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee, and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason, your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue,
Yet dearely I love you, and would be lov'd faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie,
Divorce mee, untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish mee.

John Donne (1572-1631)

Darkness always seems truer than anything else, and for this reason is so easily called “home”, a home in which we languish in the warm, damp, ruinous womb. We constantly return to our default core - that place, that way in which we are in the deepest ways, unbelievers. Sometimes, if we attend to the crack in our unbelief, we hear words that break our hearts, that deepen the crack, and pull us like gravity toward what we perhaps only have faintly hoped were true, and for a moment, we are free. But it seems almost immediately like foolishness in the face of the dark cloud that rolls in from the north under which we feel immediately familiar - we know this place better than we know anything else. This familiar place has a stronger gravity on our body, our soul, our mind. It pulls us down, down, down into the thick sticky mud of all the voices which have always seemed so convincing, so true. 

In opposition, my muse, my tease is one of those “insistent voice(s) that winter is only a season and not a way of life.” She sets me against my doubt and her smile tells me there is a different world, a true home. 

Yancey said, “Saints become saints by somehow hanging onto the stubborn conviction that things are not as they appear, and that the unseen world is as solid and trustworthy as the visible world around them.” To be like this is to accept the company of the insane, the magicians, the prophets who are grinding us down to dust, ending our life so that new life might come.

Come spring, come my hope, come the true and banish the torpor of my lost heart.