Your Despair Is The Messenger — But Will You Listen?
Despair in the form of the unexpected stranger is the despair that builds from constant violation of your own healthy desires, your own healthy aspirations. You knew that one day it had to turn up because you created it by your actions or inaction.
When despair shows up in the form of an unexpected stranger, it is not a stranger, it is a messenger in the truest sense of the word with reminders of where you need to go.
If this messenger brings you a message, it at least has to know something about you, at least where you are, where to find you.
It has always been there with you, this seemingly strange one, who knows your deepest fears, your real desires and your disappointments.
It has always been there with you taking note of your aspirations, your desires, measuring your progress towards them. And most importantly, getting a keen sense of your disappointments. The disappointments from which it itself is made.
With Mercy Comes Illumination
Your despair not only knows you keenly, but can relate to you completely. You must listen to it if you are going to benefit completely from the mercy that comes with the illumination it brings.
“Only the man who has had to face despair is really convinced that he needs mercy….” — Thomas Merton, Poet, and Social Activist
Sometimes it takes despair for you to realize what you really need and where you need to go. That despair will come to you fully aware of your tribulations and challenges.
Do not turn it away, listen to the message that it brings, let go of your fears for one sincere moment and embrace it, welcome it into your life as you would welcome into your home the sincerest of friends.
It will not lie to you, it will not deceive. Take its message and recognize the unmistakable truth within it, illumination is just the next thought away.
Then you will realize, this despair that seems to have started with your Fall, with your Autumn, and got colder and more brutal during your Winter, has in fact forced you to shed your unwanted baggage, toughened you in the right places, and softened you in the appropriate ones. You are about to blossom.
Its message — Spring is on the horizon.
Despair has within its pain and fears, lessons for the cleansing of your soul, the clearing of your path. It forces you to reexamine what really sustains you. It strips you of your pretensions. Sometimes it is a healthy dose of reality, bitter to the taste but performs great healing within when you eventually get it down.
Do not turn away from this despair. If you do, you also turn away from the lessons and experiences that will eventually bring you healing.
You turn away the illumination that brings with it the mercy that will lift you on to a different path — a path devoid of fears, a path with inbuilt guidance gently guiding you towards the fulfillment of you.
My Despair Is My True Messenger
I embrace my despair as a friend, a friend who knows enough about me to make me uncomfortable, but has brought me the seeds of comfort embedded within its truths. The truths that it knows about me, and the truths that I am about to learn of myself.
I will not turn my despair away as it is here to heal me; I know it will leave when it has done its job. I am gladly listening to my despair and abiding by its guidance as I am finding my way back to me, finding my way back to my source, my way back to the source of all that created me.
And as I connect with my source, I also connect with its requirements of me, of what truly sustains me at my best, of what will result in my own fulfillment.
I will listen to my despair.
