seven sevens

I cannot help but notice that my life has seemed to change drastically every seven years or so.  Almost to the year.  I admittedly am always searching insatiably for some meaning or rational pattern to life, but these profound changes have certainly not been intentional on my part.  

The upheavals were not as clearly defined when I was younger.  But about the time I was 14, I began to be deeply depressed.  Filled with fear and tormented, both socially and inwardly. It reached the point that I went through a long period of terrible night terrors, and the fear of insanity, by age 17.  I would wake with a start, feeling as if I were being swallowed by a pit of howling terror. But the terror would not cease when I woke. I would lie awake for hours, my heart and mind racing. Later it began to happen in waking moments, at school and in public places.  I took refuge from those horrors by clinging to what little I knew of God, through Christ.  But I was never really healthy, or whole. And my desperate faith was as deformed as my own soul. 

By the age of 21, I had reinvented myself, running from my mental and emotional troubles, and the religion they seemed entangled with.   But I could not escape myself, and my own darkness.  I was married at the age of 28, to another damaged person, that I met at a viciously judgmental church.  To be completely clear, I don't blame that church at all for my issues.  It simply served as a welcoming forum to play out my own brutal self-judgement.  The act of marrying my also wounded wife symbolized my embrace yet again, of the religious rigor that I aspired to live by.  A structure that would bring order to the chaotic darkness within me.

At 35, my wife and I ceased attending that church. I am not really sure what she would give for her own reasons, but for me it was a recognition that whatever I was doing, it had absolutely nothing to do with the real Jesus.  We moved to a new town, looking to build a normal, modest, happy life for ourselves and our children. I found work that suited me finally, and that I enjoyed.  It seemed perhaps that life would begin to make sense. 

By the time I was 42, my wife began her nursing career, which financially freed me to work freelance at architecture and spend more time on my art.  But it also seemed to hasten our growing emotional distance, and the problems in our marriage began to seem settled, and unchangeable.  My mother died soon after, financially enabling us to move to a small artsy, mountain town.  Despite the effort to invest everything once more into our marriage and relationship, we soon separated, thus completing the next transition in my life.

In the bible, the number seven is symbolic of completion, and fulfillment.  Perfection, not in the sense that we use it now, of something being without any flaws - but in the sense of something reaching its fullest and most mature form. 

Seven times seven is 49, my age now of course.  I wonder what I am?  Is my truest, fullest, most mature form something that is a reflection of good, or of evil?  Perhaps this is the year I get to find out.  If, as the writer Oswald Chambers once said, God compels us (so that we will know for ourselves) to spell out what is written in our souls, day by day - does that mean that I get to put the period on it when I so choose?   

To put it another way, what lies at the the core of my being?  Is it the empty abyss?  Or has God come to dwell in it?  Because I am weary, and would like to settle the question once and for all.