A Time to Mourn, A Time to Heal?

I recently suffered a devastating loss. 

I ran for District Judge for the 8th & 10th Wards in the city of Allentown, PA, and I lost...by 74 votes.

Although I thought I was going to see it as a win-win situation no matter how it turned out, the reality is, when it happened, I didn't see it as that win-win situation I imagined. 

I saw it as a loss, period. 

Why did this happen? How could you do this to me, God? Why would you do this to me? Haven't I been through enough already? When will you ever stop punishing me? Where is your great mercy for me?

Don't you care about my kids? How am I supposed to provide for them? Make a good life for them? Don't you care how much I'm hurting? Don't you know how much I've already been hurt?

Why do you hate me?

First, I was in shock. I was blinded by an unexpected sucker punch, that left me reeling, falling into an abysmal abyss. My life felt surreal, in a really bad way, for at least a week, if not longer. I was in a state of numb disbelief. 

As the shock began to wear off, something worse took over...unbelievable pain. Why did this hurt so bad? To most people losing a low level local election is no big deal. Yeah, it might sting from the bruise to the ego, but most people just go on living the comfortable lives they had, before they ran. To them, the most important part of running was, "getting their names out."

That wasn't the case for me. I wasn't running for name recognition. I wasn't running to use this as a launching pad for something else. I was running for a dream that was planted in my heart years ago. I was running to show others what trusting God can do. I was running to make changes in my community. I was running for my family. All of the plans, hopes and dreams I'd had throughout my life and at least the next decade of my family's lives, were wrapped up in that loss. Our past, present and future. What was I supposed to do now? I can't make a good living down here. 

I had a front row seat as I  watched God set fire to my dreams. I then realized I felt something that I hadn't felt in a long time, and not a minute while running. 

I felt FEAR. I was afraid to do anything. Life, the future, suddenly felt very scary again.

We used to do an exercise in drama class to build trust. One person volunteered to be in the center of the circle. He or she would close their eyes and fall back. Someone in the circle was supposed to catch them. 

In all the times we did that activity, thankfully, everyone was always caught.

I had chosen to fall back, with my eyes closed and arms stretched wide, full of faith, that not only was God going to catch me, He was finally, for the first time, going to lift me up. 

I couldn't believe it, I didn't want to believe it, but, He let me fall. He actually let me fall, and I hit the ground with an earthshaking, sickening thud. 

This was gonna be hard to recover from. This was gonna hurt a long, long time. This was gonna shatter my faith and already broke my heart. This was a deal-breaker of epic proportions. This was gonna set me back on my walk because I wouldn't be able to walk for a while. The fall severed my spiritual spinal cord and I was paralyzed. If I'd ever be able to walk again, it was gonna take a miracle.

As pain poured out of every fiber of my being from an endless river of tears, gargantuan sized rage began to fill me. I could feel gamma rays multiplying in every cell of my body, every strand of hair, all the way down to my toenails.

I was morphing into one of Marvel's most troubled super heroes, the Hulk. I wanted to pick up cars and throw them. I wanted to smash things with my bare hands and rip up the streets. I wanted to tear this city up and burn it down. 

I was about to set off World War T. 
Woe to anyone who got in my path.

I was a 50-foot, angry, black woman, trapped in a 5-foot body. I was not nice to strangers and didn't care. People closest to me were the most unfortunate recipients, my kids, my friends. I cut off communication to everybody. I was already lousy at keeping in touch with people, but now, it was worse. I didn't want to hear anything anyone had to say.

I went into a self-made cave and created a solitary, dark place, far away from people, especially annoying Christians, with their string of meaningless clichés. One reason so many people don't like Christians is, most of them are phony, fake, and almost never come from a genuine place with sincere sentiments that are their own. They routinely parrot things they themselves don't practice or even believe. It's just made up nonsense they say, to make themselves feel better. 

I consciously chose to be alone so my gaping wounds could fester, grow and become infected with gangrene. I wanted that feeling of power that only nurtured anger brings and intended to unleash it every chance I got. The only thing that had been holding back my inner Hulk, had been my relationship with God. 

In my journey, I had come a long way from the person I used to be, but understood there is thin line between wretched and righteous.

Everyone had abandoned us, but it was alright because it was God, my children and me against the world. Now, I knew that it was just the kids and me, as I continue to trudge up the path of Atlas, carrying the world on my shoulders. 

The realization that we are alone and always had been, was very hard to bear. All at once it meant that we were stuck in the quicksand of this desolate valley. 

Stuck in Allentown, stuck on Allen St., stuck in poverty. It meant that I had to come up with a new plan, because the best (and only) one I had, had just gone up in smoke. It meant we might be stuck here for the rest of our lives...