Where can I flee from your presence?

Psalm 139:7-12

Where can I go from your spirit?

Or where can I flee from your presence?

If I ascend to heaven, you are there;

if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there.

If I take the wings of the morning

and settle at the farthest limits of the sea,

even there your hand shall lead me,

and your right hand shall hold me fast.

If I say, "Surely the darkness shall cover me,

and the light around me become night,"

even the darkness is not dark to you;

the night is as bright as the day,

for darkness is as light to you.

Would that we might always have the perspective that time's passage affords.  There would be less despair, little doubt, more comfort, and the assurance that God is there.  Yet such an awareness awaits the morning sun.  When one is in the thick of it, one's perspective is obscured.

As one who is bipolar one learns to loathe both the height and the depth  of our experience.  Soaring with a manic euphoria is to be feared.  And the descent into the depths brings despair and a sense of abandonment.  In the name of a healthy balance these are shunned as an aberration of a disease.

And in doing so major segments of our lives are dismissed as symptoms.  Successful treatment is measured in the degree to which one maintains the healthy balance of the center.  Yet I would not be who I am were it not for the highs and the lows that have defined my existence.  This is the other balancing act.  On the one hand we yearn for that blessed normalcy that health brings.  Yet on the other, there is a recognition of the presence of God in both the heights and depths of life's experiences.

When I have been in the midst of a manic phase the presence of God was palpable.  Too much.  A delusion?  Neurons misfiring in the old noggin.  

And as darkness covered me like the night a powerful sense of being forsaken by God took over.  Where was he?  And how could he just let me descend to such depths?  And how long could I endure the awful silence of God?

It is only with time that the Psalmist sings of God's ever present love.

As those who have come out of the abyss, who have ascended to the heights and leaned over the precipice, yet survived, there is a holy calling to bear witness to the loving hand of God that sustained them.  And so, today, I'm at a place that I can sing the song.

And perhaps it will be that song that sustains a fellow traveler on this  bipolar journey until they too, can hum the melody.

It's not just that God brought us through the heights and the depths of our existence, it is that God was present in those experiences.  Would that we could only see it at the time.