CLOUDS AND MOUNTAINS

"How was your weekend, Matt?" asked Erica, cheerily.

"Well," I said, "I didn't talk to anyone from Friday night to Monday morning."

I'm struggling a bit. Anxiety, weighty old depression is heavy on me at the moment, and it obscures the truth, much like the clouds hide the sun.

You know that the sun is still there. You know that there will be sunny days again, and you know that life is so much more than the weather anyway. But there it is - oh and it's worse, because it's as though all the clouds are ganging up on you and telling you that they're all your fault.

I'm not crazy though. I'm not the cloud-whisperer. It's chemicals. I know this. My emotions are being pounded by tiny attackers in my blood-stream, pathogens trying to rewire my thinking, trying to get me to believe that I am something I'm not.

What causes them? I'm not so sure - one part spiritual, one part diet? One part over-thinking, one part loneliness? Everyone has a theory.

So.

All of this has made me consider whether I should be living alone at all.
True, I thought I'd be married by now: bombarded with the beauty and the bedlam of a family. But that hasn't been part of my blessing, and so I need to consider something else. What that is, I...

... Well, I don't know.

I do know this though: to climb a mountain, you first have to stand in its shadow. Facing it is the step, understanding its size, its enormity, its permanence. Only then can you start moving it from in front of you, one craggy step at a time, until it's under your feet.

And then when you do, when you show a little faith in your life and you've climbed it, you can look back with your face to the sun and realise that now... your shadow is falling on the mountain - instead of the other way round.

I don't know whether that's what Jesus meant by faith moving mountains. My guess is that he's trying to tell us that for disciples, anything can be unimaginable, but nothing can be impossible, no matter how huge it seems.

So, I hope I can take some positive steps - maybe move, maybe improve my diet, maybe get a lodger, maybe get a... cat? I don't really want to do any of that, but then, I don't particularly want to keep getting stuck under these heavy, awful clouds either.

Not when there are mountains to move.