Giles Corey

Most of the required reading in high school bored me a lot.  This was especially true of plays.  On top of the boredom factor, I had to add the anxiety factor.  I hated reading parts in front of classmates.  Luckily for me when it was time to go over The Crucible in eleventh grade, my teacher had a tape series that we listened to collectively.  Even still, I wasn't really that engaged in the story and slept through several days of it.

There is one moment in that story that has always stood out against the background of excessive Goodies and witches.  Giles Corey is one of the few men in the story who actually stood up for truth.  Ironically, he had a reputation for being involved in lots of lawsuits and being very feisty.  In the end he is one of the only voices of reason, and it costs him his life.  He refuses to confess that his wife is a witch during her trial.  He is held in contempt and pressured for a confession by having large stones placed on his chest while lying on the ground.  He not only sticks to the truth, he delivers one the most memorable quotes from any story that I have ever read:  "More weight."  Those are his last words as they pile more stones on him and he is crushed to death.

Lately, I've been determined to see through whatever challenges God allows to come my way, but the pressures of life have been wearing me thin.  I've been telling myself all the same things that I tell other people when they go through rough patches:  God won't leave me in the fire too long, He is good and whatever He does is for my good, or the only way to strengthen endurance is to be pushed beyond my perceived limits.  That worked for a couple weeks, and I was fairly focused on having the best day possible today and not worrying about tomorrow.

Today, it wasn't enough.  After some personal failures over the past few days, going back to a job I can't stand anymore almost snapped my mind in half.  I was very overwhelmed emotionally.  Now, the way I see it, there are two ways that a force can overwhelm something, immediate and totally or gradual and incrementally.  That's what made me think of this story today.  Every day when I walk into my staff changeover between shifts, I feel the pressing begin.  Actually, most days it starts at home when it gets close to being time to leave for work and increases during the drive in.  By the time two o'clock rolls around, my mind is mush.

So what can you do but push through it?  By the end of my work night, I usually have found some way to have fun with the adolescents that I work with.  I even went to youth group tonight with four guys. That's right.  I got payed to go hang out at a church for a couple hours.  It still sucked.  So on my drive home, I cracked.  I stopped thanking God for whatever good He is doing through all this mess and started asking Him to make it stop.  Almost immediately I was confronted with a dilemma in my paradigm.  If I believe that God is allowing uncomfortable things to take place in my life to bring about some greater good, why would I ever ask Him to make it stop.

No, God!  Don't reset my broken bones!  It's too painful!  Not to mention that I am sure there are many, many times that I have prayed for God to have His way in my life and do whatever it takes to work His plan for me.  

So I did the only thing I knew to do, I asked God to kill me.

 Not literally.  I'm not suicidal or crazy.  I absolutely love my family and friends.

I'm just that tired and exhausted.  I don't have anything left.  I would rather have my flesh killed so at least one way or another this can be over.  So God, I say the only thing I have left to say, "More weight."