The Gray Morning

My favorite time of day is the morning, between 5 and 6am, when the world is waking up. The warmth and light of the sun is present, but not yet bright enough to allow for a clear contrast of colors; everything looks gray. The grass is damp from the morning’s mist, the air still brisk. Often  I find myself looking out the window over the headboard of my bed, watching the cold of the early morning be burnt away, thinking about the troubles and pains of life, and about things I could and should do differently. The gray morning, it’s magical. It’s peaceful, but anxious. It’s sleeping, it’s alive. It’s wet, it’s dry. It’s boring, it’s interesting.

I think the gray morning is my favorite time of day, because it is symbolic of how I feel about my life. There is so much potential, so much good, so many things I can accomplish, but I’m afraid to step out of the dark, to run out the door and burn away the sin I find so much comfort in. Most of you have heard my testimony and know that I have struggled with pornography since middle school. The ugliness of this sin really is appalling, and I always tell myself after an episode that I won’t do it again, and yet I find myself the next day, turned on by the smallest thing, and yet another episode. It really is disgusting, and I feel almost inhuman afterwards. The thought of what I have just witnessed, and the affect it will have on the relationship I have with my friends and hopefully a wife and family someday, pains me to the point of not wanting to get up, for fear of participating in such an activity again. And yet I know that victory without a fight is no victory at all. It is rather a foolish manuever to avoid change, to keep things the same, to bask in the comfortability of habit and familiarity. To move forward, without actually moving.

The gray morning, like everything else, has a purpose, has a reason for its happening. It is a stage of prepartion for the day. If you have witnessed the gray morning, you have heard the trees stretching, the birds writing a new tune, the leaves uncurling, and the once still roads now flow like a river. Just like the gray morning has its purpose, my addiction also has its purpose, which in itself is pure and Godly. I simply desire to love and be loved: to express feelings, to be married, to know my wife, and share life with her. In those times of weakness, I enter into a fantasuality, a virtual reality of fantasy and desire, a place that is a blurred reflection like a misted mirror as to what I desire in my marriage life. In that moment, I notice nothing else, care about nothing else, but simply fulfilling the burning desire within me. Even though it is only a partial truth of that which I truly desire, it kills the dark need within me, like the gray morning breaks the darkness of night.

For the past 10 years have I endured this trial. I have had victories, but they are vastly outnumbered by my defeats. I know the solution to the problem, but I am hestitant to pursue such a path. I love God, I want Him to be my treasure, I want Him to be my breath, and I want to serve Him, but God and I have not gotten along lately. I know I am wrong in this attitude, but I feel He has done me wrong. I serve Him, wholly even, when things are going well, but every time God has removed the one thing in which my pleasure and joy rested in, and I have severed myself from Him, almost out of vengeance: if you’re not going to make me happy, you don’t get to have me. I should feel indebted to Him, for the love He has shown me, for forgiving me of this sin, and yet, I feel no such thing. How selfish and foolish I am, but that is where I am, that is who I am, in this gray morning.

However, there is good in the gray morning. The mystery of the gray morning, the eeriness, compels us, fills our lungs, with the will and energy and passion to live. “The magic is in the mystery.” The magic of the gray morning is in it’s mystery, is in the mystery of what the day holds for us, of what the day can be made into, of what that day will record in our minds, and the minds of our friends. The mystery of the gray morning is the foundation of the magic of life; we wake up, take a deep breath of the misty air, run out the door, and make our own magic. The magic of the gray morning becomes reality, once we step out of the mist, once we step into a world of color and sound and life.

I love the gray morning. I hate the gray morning. I want to burst out of the gray morning. I don’t want to leave the gray morning. And yet, I know the purpose of the gray morning, it’s whole reason for existence, is for it to be over, to be lived in and passed through. When I will finally leave, I do not know, but I hope it is very soon.

To my friends, to my family, to my wife, to my unborn family, I am fighting to break out of this gray morning, and to share a new gray morning with you. I love you. Oh how I long to make our own magic, in the mystery of the gray morning.

The gray morning is burning away. The dawn is breaking.