Real Life…Lived Out In The Middle Of The Night

My cousin in law and I were having dinner, over the Memorial Day weekend, in a restaurant surrounded by affluent people in an affluent enclave of Georgia, where affluent people go to get away from people like my cousin in law and I.

Fortunately for us, we have the ability to imitate affluence, and can mask our uncultured shortcomings with the best of the rest, who are also masking their shortcomings and insecurities.

I am having trouble this morning defining real life.

As we bowed our head over pizza and salad, I spoke to God in a direct manner.

I thanked God for the food, our setting, and I also asked him to eliminate any phoniness from our lives.

To be real with myself, that is what I want.

To be real with others, that is the heart of my prayer.

So here goes real this morning.

The night can be excruciatingly painful.

When everything is quiet except for the mind.

When all is still except for the heart.

When the silence of unanswered questions, and that which we do not know, is more than we do know, and can be communicated.

The night.

We turn, we toss.

We dread to see the night approach, and we celebrate it’s ending.

The rested few are far outnumbered by the restless many.

At night.

We search our hearts.

We search the hearts of others.

We attempt to untangle the knots of life that have bound us so tightly, where we can barely breathe, constricted by the cords of consequences of decisions we have made.

Yet, we set our hearts, souls and minds to continue fighting as we see the initial light from a cresting sun of a new day.

Look for the mutually affected people, dealing with real life.

Life can be messy and gets sticky.

Find those who are living out real lives and bring them words of hope, for they like you, are living in a real world, with real problems and they are looking for real hope.