Slow Train Coming

I was miserable and about to die from my youth on;  I suffer Your terrors; I grow weary.  Psalm 88:15  NASB

From my youth – Some things stick.  Some experiences you had early on just remain, buried away in the subconscious of your worldview, coloring how you look at life.  Modern psychological theory, removed from the divine, calls these early traumas.  The psalmist calls them God-absence.  What’s important about trauma is that it doesn’t go away.  It’s like a frozen bit of ice lodged in the psychic refrigerator.  It needs to be defrosted since its very presence restricts the optimal operation of the machine.  But the problem is getting at it.  Every time we try to examine what’s there, the emotional triggers send us back to the experience and we feel it all over again.  We’re back in the hole—alone, empty, stinking.  We’re back in the childhood, pre-cognitive upheaval.  Something irrational.  Dark.  Threatening.  The mysterious “why” that won’t give us any answer. 

When I was born, I was placed in an incubator for several days.  Disconnection.  Abandonment.  When I was just a year old, my brother was born.  I was no longer the infant.  More disconnection.  More abandonment.  In fact, the overwhelming feeling of my childhood was being alone.  Of course, there are good explanations for all this.  Medical necessity.  Family necessity.  Being the oldest.  Frankly, the explanations don’t help.  They don’t make the feelings go away.  Years of therapy resulted from moments of loss of touch.  “I was miserable and about to die from my youth on.”  I didn’t die.  We usually don’t.  We survive, but we have that dead person strapped to our backs, and whenever moments of panicked abandonment arrive, we feel his hands around our throats.  We feel it—even if we have all the right rational answers as to why we shouldn’t.

Life is a slow train coming.  The experiences pile up and pile up and pile up, loading the boxcars with memories.  Some good.  Some bad.  Some inexplicable.  But there’s no way to disconnect them, to send the rotten ones off on some side rail.  The slow train pulls them all along our track.   “From my youth” I’ve been picking up freight.  It’s harder now for  the train to pull it.  I’m slowing down.  Grinding to a halt.  I’d like to send some of those cars away, leave them behind and carry on without the load.  But it’s my train and every one of those cars is somehow a part of me, a part that brought my train to this particular place on the track at this particular time.  “From my youth” means I survived being young.  I’m not sure how, but I know I did some damage along the way.  The psalmist, ever conscious of God’s sovereignty, accounts for the long-haul train as something God is doing.  I suppose he’s right.  I’m not the conductor or the engineer.  I’m just the passenger waiting to go somewhere.   The Hebrew summarizes it in a word: ʿâpûnâh—I grow weary.

Yes, I do.

Topical Index: youth, nōʿar, grow weary, ʿâpûnâh, Psalm 88:15