loss-of-faith

Maybe awful things is how God speaks to us, Vernon thought, trudging up the lightless tunnel. Maybe folks don__ trust in good things no more. Maybe awful things is all God__ got to remind us he__ alive. Maybe war is God come to life in men. Vernon pushed on toward the light of day. He stepped out onto the ledge and into the heat, and it felt like leaving a theater after the matinee had shown a sad film, the glare of sunshine after the darkness far too real to suffer.

[Ilse] was suffering so keenly that she wanted to arraign the universe at the bar of her pain.

People who have recently lost someone have a certain look, recognizable maybe only to those who have seen that look on their own faces. I have noticed it on my face and I notice it now on others. The look is one of extreme vulnerability, nakedness, openness. It is the look of someone who walks from the ophthalmologist's office into the bright daylight with dilated eyes, or of someone who wears glasses and is suddenly made to take them off. These people who have lost someone look naked because they think themselves invisible. I myself felt invisible for a period of time, incorporeal. I seemed to have crossed one of those legendary rivers that divide the living from the dead, entered a place in which I could be seen only by those who were themselves recently bereaved. I understood for the first time the power in the image of the rivers, the Styx, the Lethe, the cloaked ferryman with his pole. I understood for the first time the meaning in the practice of suttee. Widows did not throw themselves on the burning raft out of grief. The burning raft was instead an accurate representation of the place to which their grief (not their families, not the community, not custom, their grief) had taken them.

When nothing becomes the vocalThen nothing becomes the focalAnd nothing__ becoming at all

I wish to go down under the waters__he cool, crystalline waters that I knew, where allthat is, here, existing, isis only to be lost within the susurrationsand the rumours of water and the evening starwe wait for...

Loss is like a wind, it either carries you to a new destination or it traps you in an ocean of stagnation. You must quickly learn how to navigate the sail, for stagnation is death.

You must understand, owing to my loss of faith in life, I had gradually, inevitably embarked upon a small world of my creation.

You do trust him, though, Giddon?""Holt, who is stealing your sculptures and is of questionable mental health?""Yes.""I trusted him five minutes ago. Now I'm at a bit of a loss.""Your opinion five minutes ago is good enough for me.

It isn't fair how I doubt him, and I wonder if he'll ever gather that my loss of faith extends further than I'd ever known it would, severing lines of trust and leveling my confidence like a city-flattening tornado.

May you comfort and healing.

Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, "I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, without any certain direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation." But my wife wasn't dead, merely absent.

Somewhere out there, a higherform of sadism, won the first round.Well, screw that. I'm not ready to bepwned.

She would never be caught unprepared again, she swore to herself. She would never trust. Never love. Never put faith in other human beings again. She would learn all she could of the shape and substance of the world, and she would find a way to survive in it.

Do we reflect on life? Someday this life will be gone.

When you look back with regret, that (regret, loss) becomes your focus. Then your focus directs you: you go back to that _ again and again.Look forward now _ and focus on your passions with joyful anticipation.Then your passion will fill the gap of your loss...and where you land us will amaze you!

When you look back with regret, that (regret, loss) becomes your focus. Then your focus directs you: you go back to that _ again and again.Choose a new rudder: Look forward now _ and focus on your passion with joyful anticipation.Then your passion will fill the empty space of your loss...and where you land up will amaze you!

Without hope we fail to exist.

I fought with all I had, a battle led by heart and faith. I fought till I had nothing. How do you restart without a heart or faith?? Now lost, broken and with no direction, I often wonder if I should have quit , while I had something left in the tank.