Of Rejection and Kingship

It was the end of what had started like normal day. I was clutching the steering wheel hard as my heart fell in what felt like a bottomless abyss. I wondered for a moment, where my torso had melted to because the beating heart just kept falling and falling and falling all 16 kilometres home. In truth, I don’t know how I got home, but I did. I thought I would find solid ground for my heart to crush into but as I laid in bed and replayed the events of that day, the whole of me was falling too and all I wanted was to shatter so that I don’t feel anymore. Is that what they call despair? I don’t know.

What I do know is that I didn’t learn my lesson then, and exactly 2 weeks later I was begging to just break and be done with it. Be done with feeling. Be done with loving people who had made it clear more than once, that they wanted nothing to do with me. Be done with being played like a deflated football. I had given all that I had to give and more that I didn’t have to spare. I walked into the hospital room, believing that the worst of the storm was over and perhaps I would find companions if only for a moment in this traumatic marker in our lives. 3 pairs of eyes looked at me dead pan and a young man found his voice and said to me, ‘We don’t want you here. Go. You are not one of us’.

Did it not matter, that I had stopped my life, pulled on resources I didn’t have to rush across town to make sure that this one whom I loved so dearly, even though our relationship was strained, got the best chance at making it out of that ugly situation alive? Did it not matter that I saw a poorly managed situation rectified fast enough to buy the time we needed for the urgent interventions? Did it not matter that I probably broke every traffic rule that day and commandeered medical professionals into some rational order while working out the admin side of the emergency while keeping ego driven foolishness at bay all by myself? Did it not matter that a life was saved that day?

But who is Tindi, a few months later, I tried again, giving more than I had to give. Pulling all the stops I knew to pull and 3 pairs of eyes looked at me from my living room. The man in the room reminded me in a steely cold detached voice, that in his eyes, I was a failure and he has no room, time or patience for failures around people like him and he could not sit and allow my failure to enmesh those who still had a chance at success…. Since then, I think I have been grieving in bits and pieces, afraid that if I felt it all, I would never live through it. I Grieved and still do for people whose hearts are still beating. Grieving the shadow of relationships that could have been better. Grieving what it cost me fighting all those battles mostly alone save for the strangers who gave me space to vent just before I blew up and a husband who couldn’t fathom where to touch this spikey burning ball. In hindsight, those random people were proof that I was never really that alone and this husband became the anchor in the storm that I so badly needed.

I think today I am giving myself space and permission to grieve it all out and perhaps close the chapter of rejection in my life. I really don’t know what that looks like, but I know I am ready for the next chapter. It’s already written in Haggai 2:9 that the glory of this present house will be greater than the glory of the former house… and in this place, the Lord says He will grant me peace.

Today I sort of meditated about David, son of Jesse. When Samuel sort out the King that God had sent him to find and anoint, his own father had forgotten he existed. What kind of relationship did David have with his own father? His brothers mocked him when he went to bring them supplies at the battle front. His newfound mentor went green with envy when He saw David’s success as a threat to him and spent the rest of his life trying to kill David. I would dare argue that his weakness for women was perhaps because he got something like belonging in the embrace… I don’t know, it’s just a guess. But by the time David’s throne was established, what had it cost him? What state was his heart in? Did it ever get repaired? How did he keep getting back on his feet?

I think the price of Kingship is brokenness. Being so broken that its abundantly clear that men can offer no meaningful refuge and so only one refuge counts, that of God the father. Only one hand counts, the one that saves, delivers and empowers one like David, one like me to somehow get up again and keep going, even when the ground falls away at our feet. Besides how else will we know we can fly?

So yes, today I grieve for all that is irretrievably broken and maybe tomorrow I will look out ahead of me and go for my crown with the testimony that The Lord himself reached down from on high and took hold of me; drew me from deep waters. He rescued me from my powerful enemies. From my foes who were too strong for me. They confronted me in my day of disaster but the Lord was my support. He brought me into a spacious place; he rescued me because he delighted in me.