Tonight I’m utterly drained and have nothing more to give; the last three days having taken everything out of me. Even typing this takes more than I want to spend.

On Friday I spent an hour on the phone with Karen, who is slowly dying of the cumulative effects of her ex-husband’s attempt to kill her. She’s 95% biker bitch and 5% baby Christian, but I know God can work with that. However, it’s exhausting to combat the “spirit(s)” at work and minister the person and work of Christ to a justifiably angry woman who has lost hope and faces a slow debilitating death. Yet, ministry is letting Christ chose whom we are to love.

Then I spend the weekend with Devin, trying to build a foundation for a relationship with someone who is quite different from me. On Saturday night I tried to talk with her father, who was tipsy drunk and played mental and spiritual games like my father. With speech loaded with humanism delivered in Christinese, he proceeded to play the challenge-via-insinuation game; never really saying what he was so clearly saying, making a lot of “Dragon-like statement” (as Driscoll would put it), but still affirming me before taking me down again. But as he said, he’d had enough to drink that he was honest. As for me, I see right through his self-loathing impositions on me and those around him. I see right through his alcoholic need for a non-judgmental environment. When he said, “Your pursuit, your concern, with ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ and ‘black’ and ‘white’ will be your undoing.”  That statement says so much I could write a small book on it, or at least a whole ‘nother post.

Then on the way home I spend another hour and fourty minutes with Karen again, who by now is doing much better thanks to the Holy Spirit and God’s orchestration of putting Christians in her miserable life to try and talk some “hope in Christ” into her. I didn’t get home until almost 3AM and didn’t get to sleep until 4AM, my mind still buzzing with that gut-kick feeling normally only get after a bad visit with my Dad.

Sunday, with four hours sleep, I finally talk to my brother Tim who tells me that he’s “not suicidal but would be happy if it all ended.” My gut was wrenched in that same way when my ol’ best friend was saying the same things. So I listen to his never-ending depression for his never-ending entanglement with troubled mother of three who has been “dying” of one cancerous malady or another for the last eight years. He’s made this woman his life, with no boundaries, to his own destruction. With the death of his brother last November, he’s looking at every one and everything as, “what if this is the last time I see or get to be with so-n-so?” and he start breaking down in tears again. And again, I give more.

But when I got to work I was drained. I put in several hours from home, but that’s it. I’ve been gut-kicked and wiped out. What saddens me further is the part of me, the voice inside, that tells me I deserve all this an worse. Maybe God is visiting upon me pain I’ve caused others. I don’t know.

Maybe I’ll blog later, maybe not. Blogging is just one more “busyness” thing to do in our chaotic world and not worth my health. I don’t give a rats ass right now in my exhaustion who the hell want me to blog. Facebook is enough.

So for now the phone goes off. The email goes quiet, and I go into self-preservation mode to simply survive this draining mini-bought of depression and emotional exhaustion. No one can help me. Everyone I know is a spiritual taker, or at least an exchanger, but not a giver. No one will do for me what I do for everyone else: just listen and then soothingly comfort me with love, in Christ.