Hi friends- This post is a day late but I hope it will be worth the wait 🙂 It was a vulnerable process for me to record and to write about.
I saw a post on Facebook a week or so ago that was a quote by Leonard Cohen “Love is not a victory march, it’s cold and it’s a broken hallelujah”
These words were like an arrow to my heart. What does it mean ‘Love is not a victory march?’ I am not sure what the meaning was in it’s origination but I know what it said to me. A victory march seems to indicate that we’ve arrived or that we are at the end of the fight. But the fight for love and life is never over. We are always growing and evolving. Changing, forgiving, relearning, listening…We don’t arrive. As a believer, I know that “victory is ours” popular, profound & often used statement. While I believe this is true, that doesn’t mean that we don’t have to work the stuff out here on this planet. We can claim victory but if we don’t actually do the work, is it really victory? Or is a pretty outside to mask the messy inside.
In the YouTube process video for this art journal spread, I did talk a bit about where this is birthed from personally. My husband and I have been married for 36 years. We have been together for 39 years. I was 15, he was 17. If you want to read the story of how God put us together, you can find it on the blog post “Girl Meets Boy – Divine Intersections”. It is a fairy tale story of divine capture and supernatural circumstances.
Fast forward 39 years. We have walked this journey together. He is my knight in tarnished armor. We are both bruised and beat up but still here. “Love is not a victory march, it’s cold and it’s a broken hallelujah”. The journey was hard. We have fought separately, we have been weary beyond words. We have lost hope and then gained it back, over and over and over again. So, yes it’s cold. But it is also a ‘broken hallelujah’.
That is the part that really struck to the core of me. All these years, as a couple we have been surviving. Yes, we had kids and they married and had kids. We’ve had jobs and taken trips. We’ve explored. We have laughed and we have cried. But it has been a broken hallelujah. Broken, because the struggle is real and the cost is real. It is a hallelujah because we are still here. God did and does preserve us. There is wreckage from the storm that has washed up on the beach of our world.
Over these last couple of weeks, I have come face to face with my inadequacies on this side of the healing journey. I have come to terms with my isolating nature, with my selfish heart and my lack of being emotionally present in my life for my family. This isn’t a poor me thing, it is a transparent reality. I want to be the person God designed me to be. The one He already knows and sees. The one who would give the very shirt off her back or the last dollar in her pocket. Who would stay up into the night to be with the ones I love. The healing journey sucks so much life out of us. At times, we can become hitched to an identity that says that we are broken and we are alone and we can take care of ourselves. That we don’t need anyone and no one needs us. We lose out on being loved and LOVING fully.
In my last blog post, I wrote about “live,loved”. I did not know at that time what that really meant until now – in conjunction with a broken hallelujah. Living loved = being present. It means giving the best of ourselves especially to the ones closest to us. It means sacrificing for someone else’s needs. It means being connected, not just tagging along in life on auto pilot. My business, my job, my ministry opportunities have all moved along to beautiful places. Other things are left in a heap called “a broken hallelujah”.
This journal spread that I created came from the deepest places in my heart. The place where value resides. Where ‘living loved’ resides. Where pure joy of listening to those I love is found. I feel like I am awake. I am finally awake. I am a survivor who has a lot more life to live. I will take the victory march and I will also acknowledge that it is and has been cold and a broken hallelujah. In that place. there is freedom I have never felt before. I am awake. I will live and I will love as I have never loved before.
I hope that as you read this, you find some comfort, hope and courage for your own journey. As well as the heart knowledge that you are not alone 🙂
