Losing It: Colleen Mitchell Reads Seth Haines

I’ve been reading Seth Haines’s memoir Coming Clean, soaking up his call to make my way through pain to sobriety, toward God and away from the habits I use to numb the hard things. But the last couple of weeks have found me drunk on my own grief, fretful and anxious, trapped in a world that feels too noisy and skin that feels too thin.

Haines and his wife stood next to their two year old’s hospital bed, planning funeral songs, when he decided he didn’t want to feel anything ever again. But it was only when he made his way into the pain that he found any peace at all.

Me? I’ve been losing it.

There are moments that haunt me, that descend over my soul like a veil of mourning. Today it was my husband, exclaiming the words over the phone to a friend— “Wow! Really? Congratulations!” In that second the sadness dropped down and enveloped me. Those words meant that someone else was getting the miracle I can’t stop hoping for.

Seconds later the sadness became bitterness and anger and then morphed into sickening guilt. I mean, what kind of person resents other people’s tiny unborn babies?

Then came the tiredness. The desire to give up fighting because the battle is too ugly, and therefore to give up hope of ever reaching the shores long fought for. To give myself over to an endless unfeeling, a world full of nothing, whatever stewing vagueness there was before the world bore the image of God. To never feel anything again.

Somewhere Haines’s words come back to me, and I decided. No, it will not be like this.

I want to feel. I want the hurt, the pain, the isolating confusion. For in it is buried my hope, my purpose, my way. I could turn away from the stormy sea of grief, but there is no other horizon. There is only nothingness.

Either I take the cross and the resurrection, and I drink it down as the elixir that burns my throat as it heals my bones, or I turn away and thirst forever. Either I lay my weeping wounds out on the street and wait for the shadow of the power of God to pass by, or I wither and die. Either I confess my doubts, then splay my fingers and thrust them up into the wounds of Christ until I feel the slippery thrum of his beating heart, or I close my fists and hold on to nothing.

The weight of the cross on my back, or the numbness of death.

This is it; there is no other choice. No choice between sickness and health, battle and victory, doubt and faith. It’s either all of them or it’s nothing, the silence of a heart that ceases to beat.

No, I’m not all right.

I’m sick.

I doubt.

I’ve felt the teeth of terrible things.

I’ve lost my mind and only half found it again.

So take the corners of my mat, pilgrim friends. Lay me out in the streets for the world to see my sickness. Hear my questioning uncertainty. Watch me stick my unbelieving finger into the wound of God. This is what it means to live sober and awake. This is what it means to chase eternal life. For we only attain that life if we value it, and we only value it if we know what it is to live while we lose it.

As the veil of grief drops, I behold my salvation.

Colleen C. Mitchell is the author of the forthcoming book Who Does He Say You Are? Women Transformed by Christ in the Gospels (Servant, 2016). She’s wife to Greg and mother to five amazing sons here on earth and five children in heaven. Colleen and Greg are foreign missionaries in Costa Rica, where they run the St. Francis Emmaus Center, a ministry that welcomes indigenous mothers into their home to access medical care. She works out what it means to trust Jesus, grieve well, and live a raw faith at her blog, Blessed Are the Feet.