Have you ever felt like you couldn’t breathe? But the feeling doesn’t come from your lungs. It comes from your heart. The deep, burning desire for more oxygen that sits in your chest like a rock floating in your sternum. You can feel it departing from your chest only when tears start to stream from your eyes and down your cheeks to dampen your shirt, leaving dark pools of depression lingering minutes after you’ve finished. Only then can you get the desired feeling of not happiness… but more of a melancholy feeling that leaves your body only to be replaced by shame. You know you shouldn’t be ashamed of what had just happened or the way you had just felt. It’s something that you feel without thinking as your friends around you look at worried glances. You may even see their own pain that they ache for you pooled against either one of your shirts. And in minutes, the deed is finished and you’re onto another thought.
What if this feeling never left? What if the minutes or even hours of your tears streaming down your face makes the feeling that sits against your chest even worse? That aching feeling of wanting to rid your body of this poisonous feeling is almost sewn into your emotions like a patch to cover something that you’re missing. The salty tears that dump from your ducts shows that your body is seeming to reject the patch that your mind had made to keep the poison from erupting through your body and killing you with each minute that ticked by on the clock. The worst part is when all you can see written across the patch is “Unknown”.
You don’t know why you feel like this. All you know is you want to fix it. The “Unknown” seems to scare you but the only thing you’re able to do is cry and hope the patch fixes itself. The longer you let it sit and take over how you and your body feels, it seems to fester like a wound. It becomes infected because of all the crying and the healing you try to do over the years. You feel as if no one could ever be able to rip the seams out and press something against the opening in your soul to prevent the horrid world from seeping in and tampering with what you love. Friends and family almost put a barrier over the patch once removed, but all it does is temporarily fix the problem and it comes back when they seem to fade for only a mere moment.
Of course, when the fading is prominent enough for you to notice is when the panic erupts. You start to grab for everything you can, anything that will prevent you from slipping into the darkness of your own mind and shut everyone out. You feel fingers, you feel palms and the scent of salt, a wetness dampening your fingers. You realize that it wasn’t coming from your own face, but the faces above you that are reaching out. You watch as their own depression stream down their cheeks to land on the outstretched hand in front of you. The feeling burns at your skin, an explosion of regret, fear and blame pulling your hand away and the door shuts, the sounds of people you love dimming out to mere whispers. Blackness wells around your eyes as the one opening for happiness gently creaks shut. You hands pry at the once opened door but there’s no use. You curl up in the darkness around you, chilling your body to a mere hault.
Your muscles ache as you lie there, unable to push them any farther. Tears pool not only on your shirt, but your hands and the ground around you. You finally feel as though you won’t move again. You’ll die here….
Until a light erupts against your closed eyes. The light send your eyes into a stinging pain as you try to pry them open. You see a hand in front of you, although the light above you prevents you from seeing who it is. Your heart fills with joy all of a sudden, your tears falling to a halt. Another hand comes down to wipe the tears from your soul, soaking up the feeling of dread, misplacement, depression and pulls you from the hole that you had set yourself in. As you look up you see one face. The face of God. Suddenly drowning in love, his hands pull you into an embrace that wraps around you like an angel’s wings. The light no longer pains your eyes to look into, the feeling of wonderful bliss filling you and shoving the rock that sat against your feeble chest to the side and freeing you of the terrible, crushing depression that brought you from where you were.
The faces of your loved ones quickly replace the face of God and a smile finally spreads across your face. The “Unknown” patch’s hinges on you quickly are freed, the patch of the Holy Spirit spilling across the hole and healing the wound that it had created throughout the years. As you sit there, you finally feel the feeling of crying, but… it’s not of sadness. It’s of happiness. The feeling of regret and depression is replaced with nothing you could dream of. The darkness in your soul is enveloped with the brightness that you had seen only moments before.
Whatever happens, God is always there. He loves you with everything he has. The least we can do is look up to him, knowing that everything is going to be okay. Put our entire lives into his hands and let him work his miracles. We all have an “Unknown” patch and the only thing that can get rid of the festation is his light. Never forget he is always with you, no matter what you’re doing. Walk in the light of Him and you’ll never stray or feel like you’re alone. He will always pull that rock from your chest and wipe the tears from your face when you’re upset. Always.
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125,025 Literary Works • 672,762 Reviews
Thank you for this story. Though I do not claim a religion, I do believe in God and his love for us. I was happy to see that this story completely throws out the concept of religion and addresses God's love and desire to see us happy.
The weight that you have described here, being the sin and shame we feel within our lifetime, is a great way of describing how empty we can feel without God in our lives. Usually there are two reactions to this emptiness that people feel. There is the feeling of sadness and emptiness that seems to consume us and weigh us down day after day. Then there are those that spend their lives trying to fill that God-shaped hole in all of us. They fill it with possessions, wealth, pleasures, and everything else that they can fill up with. These usually being the most self-destructive of the two.
Isn't it wonderful that God made the choice to step down from his throne so that the could take us by the hand and lead him to us once again? That a king would set aside his crown so that he could lift us up so and wrap us up in his embrace.
Thank you once again for sharing this with us. It is a wonderful description of how someone feels when the light of God enters their life.
You use of description is the perfect balance between description and vague enough for the reader to decide what some of the objects are. For instance you describe this sadness as a weight, but leave what the weight actually is up to the reader so that they can place a personal feeling to it.
Happy Writing!
This is a wonderful description of the "hole that needs to be filled with a God-shaped peg" that all our youth group leaders clumsily attempt to describe. It drags us through every little sensation of that "missing something" or "piece of emptiness" that everyone feels but no one can quite place. That ache that everyone runs around trying to heal with some religion, or self-religion, or nature, but which never really gets healed until the Holy Spirit comes and fills it.
I love how you used the word "Unknown" for the patch's name. It reminds me of when Paul encountered the "Altar to an Unknown God" and got up to preach to the people about it. In fact, I think that's exactly what you were referring to. It's like everyone has an altar to an unknown god in their heart, and in seeking to fill that hole, they're seeking that unknown god.
And the "rock on your chest"--that's sin and guilt, isn't it? In the moment at which the hole spreads and festers too far, at which you can no longer hope to find anything that will heal it, that's when the Holy Spirit appears. I love how you didn't portray God's salvation as an act of will and decision that you have to make, but as God appearing in an overwhelming, drowning manifestation of His sovereign love and the irresistible grace of His Spirit. How you're brought up from a state of complete helplessness. I also like how at first God's light hurts, but then it doesn't, because that's how it is to encounter God's holiness, but to be made holy in Christ. Sound doctrine, my friend.
Hehe, ell said this won't convert anyone. We'll leave that up to God. But if ell says you should add a "why" around "God is always there", then do add in that "why". I think you wrote this to unbelievers and not primarily to believers, though I'm also encouraged by it. Every time I try to turn away from Christ that "Unknown" patch comes back in a way, but it's always healed when He brings me back, reminding me again of His presence. Often, it's in my worst moments that I feel the Holy Spirit gently filling me. Once I even said to Him, "What are You doing here?" then had to laugh because of course He was there.
I'm not going to call this a review so that other people can still stumble across it in the Green Room. I think it'll resonate with a lot of unbelievers, even if they try to shove away the solution when they come to it and pretend that it's not really the answer to the Unknown patch. It's planting seeds for the Gospel. God bless you!
Happy Review Day.
As a former Christian, I feel that this doesn't represent my viewpoint on the Holy Ghost (that's what my friends call it anyway). However, that does not matter. I just thought I should tell you that because I fear I might get subjective, but throughout this I'll try to be as objective as possible.
-"But the feeling doesn’t come from your lungs. It comes from your heart." This feels as if you're either jumping into the emotion as quickly as possible. I feel like you wrote this in one sitting after a really depressive episode, and that's fine, but I think after that we can tweak it a little to service other people as well. Comfort other people. Because you know, isn't that the point of writing? To communicate emotion. (ranting, ranting, moving on)
-"Whatever happens, God is always there." This is a suggestion from an outsider, but why would God always be there? Why does He love? It's these little details that can make even atheists feel something for a religious work, that often religious people forget about. You don't have to implement it, but it would be wonderful to see why God is always there, or what His motives are.
-"You’ll die here…." Personal preference: cool it down with the ellipses. They can come off as very amateurish if you use them too much, instead of being a useful pause in the flow. If I were you, I'd single this out as a paragraph of its own and add a "you think" in the end.
Other than that, this work services a good amount of people. It doesn't convert anyone, but I think if your intention was to comfort others who already believe, it's fine on its own.
Signing out--EM.
Deep feeling,
Solid starting by asking a question.and yes i felt i could not able to breath .
You put a great connection between all those things and god.
Overall awesome
Your writing is extraordinarily written. Your words are filled with passion and so much feeling. I would love to give you constructive criticism but unfortunately your prose led me to breathlessness. Excuse me while I go cry.