the hope in something like fear

So it's the middle of the afternoon on a warm yet comfortable day and the sky is caving in a very interesting way. It's not falling. It's not asphyxiating. It's almost like it's anxious for something terrible to happen, but not that worried because nothing short of God could do anything terrible to something as big and amazing as the sky. It's a strange feeling. I was thinking again the other night about the vision I used to have of a rope coming out of the ceiling when I would lie in bed and I would grip the rope and pull myself up and it wasn't so much a lazy man's vision of something helping him out of bed, it was more like a symbol of a beckoning hope that never failed. Anytime I was in bed this rope came out of the sky (not even the ceiling, whatever surface was above me). It was this entity that wanted to help me, to pull me out of whatever devastation I was in at the moment, my escape. Then one day after I had come to trust this hope, this vision, and I pulled myself out of bed with this rope and climbed it, up away from all the things that were tearing me apart and toward some blessed unknown, the end of the rope became a noose. It gave me the impression that the only hope I had, this rope, was suicide, death. Nothing would ever revive me from my coma, a sublime fear of the future.

Well the future has arrived, and I must say that it's not as bad as I apparently thought. I have come to know a greater hope than the rope that hung down from the sky, namely the Lord Jesus Christ, and I struggle greatly to follow Him daily. But all of the little things in life, in love, in marriage that keep me reeling with this feeling that there's more that I am missing, and more I could be giving, and so much less that I deserve. And I'm humbly here, sitting at an antique oak desk, deciding that my future will be better than my past. That I will from now onward choke back my feelings as well as my words. That the pride of my youth will be murdered and buried with the aborted fetuses of the present generation. That I will not react in such a manner as I have taught myself to react. Because of Jesus, and because it's a lovely, warm, time-spattered day, I shall replace my visor, wield my spar and live to fight another day.