Holy Week: day 34

I'm afraid I didn't memorize any psalms lately; instead, past bedtime and into the morning of Palm Sunday I obsessively read a biography of Marie Antoinette from the beginning of the book for a couple hours, then skipping to the end (which I almost never do) and found it was 2:40 am in the morning. After crying a bit and wandering around, I finally went to bed at 3:30, then I couldn't go to sleep even after 4, then I must've slept for 2 and a half hours and got up at 7:30 to go to church...
I don't know how long it's going to take to recover, I do feel so strange and unbalanced between being disturbed and content, between depressed and hopeful...

Earlier I wrote of Brother Lawrence's consolation to his troubled soul to decide that his eternity could not interfere with his present decision to love and follow God. Yet now I am troubled about those whose souls have passed away and about whose eternity I do not know...

I somehow have slight unbalance between my reason and the feelings of my intuition...I feel that somehow the story of one soul is the story of many--and even perhaps of the whole world. There are a few past souls who seem clear--like past emptiness and past completion; yet there are so many, who press our hearts with the sympathetic uncertainty of "swinging between the heaven gate and the hell gate"--the struggle between self-love and the alluring love of the world; and of the self-abandoning, seemingly impossible love for God.

History is partly looking from eternity upon the final decisions of men; yet the past is also in a present and undetermined state--there is a hidden and final determination of each ending that shall make the unbalanced and incomplete things fair.

Reading a story of a struggling soul feels like trying to "hold water in your hand", or praying for an baby to be born...left not knowing the outcome, and wondering if it is might be your own.
And this not just a story of one soul, but of many, of nations, and even in a strange way--the world.