Maybe It’s Because This World Isn’t All There Is

By: Lizzie Joy (Loveland) Nunemaker

There are kids that grow up in homes that are worse than war zones

The things they see are so bad they can’t even speak it —they have to write it on a notecard 

Slide it across a therapist’s desk, mine. 

We sit in silence

I’ve seen too much, heard too much. I can’t watch horror movies because they get it right too often. But also because I hate demons and glorifying darkness. My brother, a horror buff and horror writer says the best of the best and the worst of the worst movies are horror, and he has a perfect IQ score (180) and studied film;  he generally knows more than I. 

Those of us with the heightened senses of prey animals, we get nervous easy, though.

I can see why there are unbelievers. One of the first women I counseled as a counseling intern at the local methadone clinic was pimped out by her mom at the age of eight, to pay for her mom’s own heroin addiction. She overdosed on the benzos that she had taken in the parking lot right before she entered my office and I got to pray over her as she was strapped into a gurney. I loved her so much, and yet it was painful to watch her struggle through the first few days of IOP group. She didn’t know how to be a person, in a classroom; didn’t know what could or couldn’t be said—or how to sit. How to make her face move appropriately. I saw a lot of myself in her struggling attempts to be normal when her entire life was decidedly anything but.

I can understand why people don’t want to believe there is an all powerful and just God. When you meet a ten-year-old with a toddler vocabulary, whose brain has been nearly lobotomized due to brain cancer first diagnosed at age two. His dad was trying to distract him with a fish tank in the radiology waiting area. His hair line was a patchwork quilt of scars—hair growing like pieces of sod roughly laid down that never took root into the ground.

I can understand why people don’t believe anything changed. Maybe there was or wasn’t a messiah, but an addict’s shaking detox prayers all slur together. They can never stay sober long, because sober means this miserable reality comes back- memories of the generational horrors. Sober means realizing they don’t know how to be human, how to talk or interact. How to make people like them, or how to make the people that are supposed to care or love them to actually care and love them. They are genuinely living for a numbed reality because this life is so-

You know, sometimes there aren’t any words.

There just aren’t enough words, the right words, any words. 

There’s just the thought, it trembles, you could see it shake in a glass of water: “o come, o come Emmanuel.”

Please come, please come Emmanuel.

They are speaking in tongues. Because their spirits’ are praying on their own behalf— because some things are too fearful, too holy, to horrifying, some things just can’t be uttered.

An eleven-year-old boy finally was able to slide a notecard back and forth in my office. He couldn’t speak out loud, the horrors. I loved his volatile heart so much I wished I could be God and erase it all for him.

The thing is, I understand why people didn’t recognize Jesus as THE messiah. Son of God, why?

That’s all, just why? Why didn’t He kick ass and take names so much so that all of death was swallowed up once and for all by life? Why didn’t He come with the finality that is at times mentioned in Isaiah, Revelations, when the lion lays down with the lamb and the kid can play by the dangerous animals? When there is no more suffering and every tear is wiped away?

Why has He allowed the horrors to continue?

So many horrors. 

Why have they had to keep on continuing for 2023 or so additional years of unmitigated misery?

Why?

In Al-anon they say you can have internal peace even if your qualifier (the person with the alcoholism or addiction) continues in their addiction. I think my mouth actually dropped open as I scanned the room in disbelief the first time I heard that. 

But then the gospels, Christ’s words seem so wacky if you really look at them: you’re blessed if you morn? You’re blessed if you’re poor/poor in spirit? You’re blessed if you have nothing?

He preaches about a world we might get to partake in if we tow the line here? The way He talks and walks and preaches it’s as though we are missing the point. It’s not about having enough in your retirement account, it’s if you have two coats give one to your brother in need.

It’s not about if you are “happy” in your marriage— it’s to love your spouse and show them respect whether or not they are righteous or deserving. It’s not whether or not you feel good feelings about your terrible boss that demeans you, it’s bearing up – being loving when you want to yell back, praying a blessing for them when you want to pray that God smite all your enemies in a single Old-Testament-type blow.

It doesn’t make any sense, that the first in this world will indeed be last. How the man that sleeps inside a urine stained sleeping bag may have more faith than you do. He knows God, even if his mind is like a cave of angry bats. He might very well be sitting in a place of honor at God’s table one day.

It all feels too far off, this world is indeed, too much with us.

Maybe there is something to what He says, learning to LOVE your enemies; it’s scandalous and feels like swallowing saltwater up the nose, but maybe His kingdom can only be accessed when we start to humbly accept the painful teaching. We thank Him for our lack, and for the work He alone can do in our hard hearts. To make us forgive the unforgivable. To love the damnable, and to pray for the depraved. To bear up nobly under suffering, and injustice, and the many cruel and unstable tyrants we are all bound to experience in this world. 

But maybe having a Messiah come- it’s not necessarily to make things better here- your circumstances that reek of dis-ease, your family that doesn’t love you right, the pain and the longing and the regret you carry—maybe this really isn’t all there is.

All there is, really, is Him. There’s these unspeakable horrors and wonders here, and broken beings, and misplaced longings— but behind all of that, it’s all Him. And nothing He says makes any kind of sense until we understand that this is not all there is, this is nothing, this is a clap of a wave in the ocean of eternity.

At the end of the day we are all clasping our hands, praying in tongues, “O Come O Come Emmanuel.

Be with us here, until we can be with you there. 

Because this world isn’t all there is.”