The dust had settled deep into the folds of my robe, a fine, gritty powder that seemed the very substance of my days. It was no longer just on the ground; it was in my mouth, a constant taste of the grave. My breath, what little of it came easily, was a shallow thing, and my eyes—my eyes felt as though they had been scoured with sand from the pit where I would soon lie.
My spirit is broken. It is not a dramatic shattering, not the way a clay pot falls and breaks into recognizable pieces. No, it is a slow, internal dissolution, like a threadbare cloth finally giving way to nothing. My days are extinct, the wicks of their lamps snuffed out, leaving only the acrid smell of smoke. The grave is ready for me, and I for it. I find my thoughts turning not to the light, but to the darkness, to the worms that will be my kin and the dust my blanket. It is a perverse comfort, this certainty of an end.
If I look around, I see only mockers. Their eyes are upon me, and my decline is their entertainment. They have no answer for my grief, only a curled lip, a silent accusation that hangs in the air thicker than the dust. Who among them can truly partner with me? My hand is not lifted in fellowship anymore, but in a feeble warding off. There is no one whose spirit I can trust to walk with me into this shadowed valley. Their hearts are closed to understanding, and God, it seems, has delivered me into their hands. He has made me a byword, a thing to be pointed at. I am a spectacle, and my face is heavy with the weight of their stares, red-raw from weeping that brings no relief.
It is a strange thing, to feel your own mind slipping into the company of the foolish, the desperate. My grief has become my only companion, and it is a poor one, whispering only of despair. And so I cry out to the innocent, to the righteous, though I doubt any can hear me. “Let the upright be appalled!” I want my plight to be a shock to their system, a shudder that runs through their comfortable faith. And let the one whose hands are clean stir himself up, rise up in indignation against this injustice. But what good would it do? My course is set. It is finished. I will not live to see another turn of fortune.
Yet, they—my so-called comforters—they hold fast to their platitudes. They have their schemes, their tidy explanations. “The light is near,” they say, “for the wicked, but darkness for the disobedient.” They speak of houses and of hope as if they are bargaining in a marketplace. But what hope do I have? Can hope go down to the bars of Sheol? Will it descend with me into the dust, into that place where the gates close with a finality that echoes through all eternity?
All I have left are my thoughts, and they are my only companions in this long, slow walk to the pit. They are my inheritance, my portion from God. And so I ask, a question that is more a sigh than a challenge: Where then is my hope? As for my hope, who can see it? It has gone down to the dust. It will rest with me in the earth, and there, we will lie down together.
