It was one thing when I had heard he had moved back to Ohio to his hometown. It was one thing when he went on to work for a ministry with which I was very familiar. It was again another thing when I FORCED myself to do a very quick social media search and see him standing smiling next to his wife, Sarah. It was another thing upon that when a single search a few years later showed me that he had added a child to his family. I was able to stand that. I was able to stand the fact that he was able to stand right up after he picked the bones of my soul almost clean and then build a whole life without any hint of trouble or difficulty. This life fits every dream of convention anyone could ever have. But it has now been a totally other thing entirely to now see that he has been granted the pastorate of a church in the very same town where I once felt terrified for my own life.
I sit, shaking, so enraged. My mind does a brutal replay of every moment I felt afraid. I make myself go to the website for the church. I clicked on "sermon audio" and I remind myself that it is my right to do this. I have earned the right to listen to the sound of his voice. At first it sounds just as contrived as every other 30 something dude who wants to hear the eloquence drip from his own tongue as he draws out the last letter of the last word of a sentance he thought up with Jesus attached to it. But I listen more. I let him continue past his introductory taglines. More contrived tone. Fake. Softness that is manufactured and I know because I lived it. And then I hear it. I hear his words in my ear. I remember him screaming in my face. I remember his clenched jaw and the absolute insanity in his eyes.
My blood is running cold again. 15 years feels like 5 minutes. I can see my whole life played out, and I feel like I just got out of his truck all in the same moment. Still shaking. Why am I shaking? I'm not afraid, but I am - not present me. Past me feels afraid. I had thought I had done all I needed to do to lay her to rest - to rest in peace, but I feel fear as my hands shake holding my phone in my hand and staring straight at the image of a man who stole so much from me.
I thought it was done. But there was a missing piece. The truth of what happened has been made public except for one part - the part that allowed him to move on with his life as if nothing had happened and then build a life and have a son down to whom he will pass this very thing. His name.
I tell you even as I type that I ask myself a thousand questions. What will happen if I tell? What could he do to me to terrorize THIS part of my life? What would I do if people choose not to dirty their hands instead of grabbing mine and holding me up?
...What good does it do? Why does it matter that people know the name of the man who callously and coldly murdered my innocence? Why can't I just share more of the emotional journey and just leave out that piece??? The piece that actually protects him but it protects me too because as long as I don't say it and name a specific person, I get to move freely through my world of advocacy and his world is not upturned - his rage is not kindled.
What if there are others? And why aren't you alone worth the freedom to tell the actual truth???
There was another time in my life that came after this monster when I asked myself all those questions. I felt convinced that I was the only one - that what was happening was only affecting me. I will forever hate the part of myself that was grossly mistaken. And so now, me of some years ago stands before me of now and asks "What makes you so sure????" And I have to give the honest answer.
Nothing.
Nothing makes me sure. In fact, statistically, it is really unlikely that I am the only one, but EVEN IF I AM THE ONLY ONE, I STILL GET TO NAME THE MONSTER WHO ATTACKED ME. *caps for emphasis, not anger
I get so close to typing out all the letters and then I ask myself "and THEN what?" His church scrapes together money to pay for representation who then sends me a cease and desist. I am quieted again. And if I continue to speak, then what? It is likely again that I will stand alone. I keep talking only to have to stand before a judge and make it a matter of public record every filthy thing he did to me. The judge cannot rule in my favor because I don't have a way to prove anything and the statute of limitations has run out on my rapes and molestations and all the abuse he managed to squeeze into just a few months 15 years ago. Case dismissed at the very best. That's really all I could hope for, and you know what I mean if you've ever lived pro se'.
What happens after that? Do you think everyone who knows me is going to rally around me and praise my courage and help me hobble my next step to finding my way out of all this? I can tell you that I doubt it. I can tell you that I have lived a whole lot of people not wanting to get their hands dirty. They don't want to take a risk that I'm wrong or they've been duped because, you see, people can say kind things so they feel like they've done a good deed, but very few of them are going to truly believe me. I already know this. I've already lived it. Years upon years, I've already lived it. It doesn't matter how true the things are that I have to say. It doesn't matter that they really did happen, and I am ready and willing to swear my oath on the words sent to us from an Almighty God.
I will never stop. I will never stop telling the story of what this man's tenure in my life has done to the rest of it. I ready myself for the potential opportunity to get to stare him straight in the eye and tell him that I am here to fight in past tense for the me that he murdered and that he is no longer allowed to hide behind my silence - my protection of this one last detail. It's just that I do not know when or how I will ever do it. How will I ever actually bring myself to say out loud his name and escape the haunt of me from 15 years ago begging and pleading with the me of now to just tell
Friday, October 26, 2018
Wednesday, October 3, 2018
On contentment
Contentment is a concept that has always baffled me. I never could make sense of just being fine with the way things are. I mean, I fully understand being grateful for the good things you've been given, but it does not compute in my brain why you should just abandon drive to make things better or to make yourself grow or even pursue justice where it failed to take root. That last one really bites into my soul deep.
I am reading a book by a woman who, unlike most (especially Christian) authors, does not write from a place where "struggle" is the mental and emotional pressure you place on yourself as you almost wish a life of spiritual abundance on other people whilst you sit smiling listening to a poor, battered soul share trials and pain for which you have no point of reference. I know plenty of women in ministry who get their hands dirty and who have lived real life, but it seems that precious few of them are authors. Rather, I have read in great supply, women who relate minor unhappinesses as "ways God was growin me!!!". It has been offputting to me to be offered some trite comfort by a soul sitting in privilege.
This book and this author have been very different, and so it has lowered my guard and allowed my heart to listen to what she has to say. It is easy to preach and live thankfulness when your life has not included much loss. You don't even ever need to have lived a fancy moment in your life. If your days and plans even closely resemble convention at all, most everything you face as a struggle can be brushed aside like a hair that has fallen from your coiffed circumstances. If you want me to listen to advice you have to offer, it is just true for me that I need to know that you know what loss feels like - significant loss a significant number of times. I have seen the reflection of that in this author, and so I have been willing to read and have quite an evolution of my thoughts.
When I say to you that I have been my whole life a rule follower, I need you to know that it is a painfully obvious trait of my character. And it was actually never from the origin of not wanting to upset people. It actually registered very early in my heart that deviating from the structure provided to you by people who loved you could cause them to be hurt. I found that type of hurt to be so purposeless that I, even still, very highly value a well thought out rule. Additionally, I experienced that the following closely of rules actually evoked very positive feelings from other people which rolled right into positive experiences for me. One of those positive results was and still is the freedom to make some choices for myself and the granting of requests I had because I also have usually been astute enough to realize what was reasonable.
So I did this. I built a very reasonable life construct in my head that didn't just allow for, but centered around devotion to the God who loves me. None of this seemed weird, and I had found myself even allowing for the absense of some of the things that were hard and fast requirements for some of my constituents. I didn't feel like I was settling in any way by passing these things by. I felt really excited about the life I wanted so much that I didn't want those things anyway.
Then came the day that I got the life I wanted. 5 months and 1 day after our first date, I married the Marine who had swept me off my feet during his Christmas leave. By this point, NOTHING in my life story and fairy tale looked like those of the other girls, but I loved mine. It was as colorful and unique as I have always been. No part of me felt cheated by it. I almost felt proud of myself for that. In fact, my heart willingly and excitedly accepted the role of support I could provide to the man I loved the moment he told me that "It gives me somebody to come back to...somebody to fight for.....it would just...give me that 'at ease' feeling" for us getting married before he left for a deployment into combat. It was happening in a very meandering way, but it was happening - the life I wanted.
The moment - the exact moment, where I stood, what I was wearing, which lights were on in the direction I was facing and most especially how it felt when I realized that the life I had was not the one I wanted. I had stepped right into a life that was nowhere near the life I wanted. "oh....no.....what have I done? We are married now. I have married him. This is my life....how long am I going to have to do this? How long CAN I do this?" all screamed through my brain in almost an instant.
My parents were the epitome of commitment. Their life together was not all romance, but their perseverence and complete and utter commitment to each other was the stuff of the most romantic notions you'll ever hear. They "loved each other through" some really high hurdles. I watched it happen. Some of these happened outside the window of my ability to recall, but I remember a lot of them, so I just drew from that. I was just going to love "through" the things in front of me that looked like challenges, and then my husband and I would have the same example and the same romance to show to the world and to the children that hadn't even been thought of yet.
I was 9 weeks pregnant when the father of that baby left for what would be his last deployment for the Marine Corps. I spent from late fall to mid spring praying over him and doing everything I could to make him proud and happy to come home while our sweet little first born grew under my heart. He came home without a scratch anyone could see, and then our baby was born. Life almost immediately began yanking me further and further away from the life I wanted and the one I thought I had.
I fought. I fought really hard. I would spend almost every evening with my laptop on my knees researching strategies I could use to yank my dream back from the clutches of life which I was now realizing could be cruel to a depth I didn't know existed. Then, I don't even know how many times, I would wait for everyone else in my house to be asleep and I would lay totally flat on the floor of my living room, and I would pray. I would literally beg the God of the Universe to fix and restore the life that I always wanted. I would beg and I would cry, and I would cry until the carpet was soaked under where the tears fell from the end of my nose.
There were glimpses over the next couple of years that gave me a hope that was nothing more than an apparition, and so those glimpses would dissipate just as quickly as they'd smoked their way up in front of my gaze until one day I realized that I had no choice but to suspend my dream of the life I always wanted. I packed a couple of bags of clothes and then scooped up now two children and put them into the backseat of the cab of my brother's truck, and I rode away from the life I always wanted and the life I thought I had or was at least going to get.
It is a surreal thing to see the words "irretrievably broken" printed on a paper that is public record and for those two words to be what is the final description of a dream you spent your whole life building. Somewhere during the litigation and processing of paperwork and mediation and court dates, I felt so turned around. I felt like my whole world was on a tilt-a-whirl at a fair and the operator had just decided to leave while I spun until I was sick. I couldn't figure out what to pray for, so I just sat in my sister's bedroom chair and thought about what I wanted. "I just want to know the truth because I don't even know who to believe about anything anymore including myself." So I postured myself in the same way I had really countless times before, and I begged the God of the Universe to focus attention on me and show me truth, and then I prayed that God give me back the life I always wanted, and I will never forget the clarity with which I heard his voice in the ear of my deepest heart.
"No."
This is another life moment that is seared into my consciousness. I am honestly still a little dumbstruck, but God's answer to a request I found to be, not just reasonable but beneficial even, was a very hard "no". Also in that moment of such clear answer, I couldn't help but admit to myself that I'd actually been being given that answer for a really long time. In fact, I knew I'd been hearing it every single one of all of those nights with my nose pressed into the carpet.
As pen scratched across paper leaving the ink of our initials on the very paperwork that was proof that almost the whole of my identity was changed, I was properly introduced to Hope. Because when everything of the life you wanted and everything of the life you had gets completely erased with just paperwork, hope is really all you've got left. That is where you realize that hope has got to be your starting place.
Now, as I have learned from spending years with a philopher, every trait is a spectrum of virtue and vice, and it is totally our own choice of where we would like to fall. I feel comfortable in admitting that I have a measure of tenacity that rivals really a lot of other people. The phrase "I would have quit way before you did" is very familiar to me. As is obvious, there can be great virtue with this. Persevering through difficulty or weariness can yield amazing things with amazing influence for good. It's just also true that this spectrum of tenacity also has a pole of vice, and that vice is stubbornness. Examples of this in my life don't so much include my insisitence to get my way in interactions with other people. It's just that I sort of carried with me that persistence to keep chasing and keep asking for the very thing about which I had been told "no". While I had accepted that God had said "no", I really hadn't accepted that it would be a permanent "no".
Some choices in your life present with their origin very clearly like "I should never have bought that car that was outside my budget" or "I think I'm going to go to school closer to home next semester. They have a better program at ___" or "I really hate this job. There's not a reason for me to keep working here". Relationships are seldom that cut and dry. There are almost always intricacies that are knit through what makes sense and what seems advantageous or good as many as there are ones that are woven way outside what we can see as good for us. And you know, I really spent every moment away from the life I always wanted still wanting that specific life that I wanted, so I jumped at the very first chance I was given to "try again" and "make it work". One truth about me is, you cannot out-love me. You may love equally, but I will let someone walk all over me and treat me like dirt and do that for a long time before I sever ties. I just would rather love, so being presented with the opportunity to do that with the idea of all of that being reciprocated was like music to me. I will tell you this: hindsight being 20\20, I will never know in this life if the reconciliation effort for my marriage was "supposed to happen", but I do know this - that time gave me one of my greatest life treasures. About a year after we all moved back into one house, the uncharacteristic queesiness I felt after reading a book from my seat on a road trip inspired me to pee on a little plastic stick that showed me fast that baby number 3 was growing under my heart. Upon learning that baby would be a girl, I found it the right thing to do to bestow upon her the middle name "Hope" - the very thing from whence she was conceived.
A few months into my pregnancy, I agreed to move away from my home and away from my family. Wise people begged me not to, but I wanted to sustain the happiness I felt. Rejecting this request made me worry that the happiness would end, and gone, back into the ghostly smoke would float the life I always wanted. And so everything from inside our house went onto a truck, and we drove way from my home.
It happened to me again - that question "what have I done?". With the passing of not much time at all, I was reacquainted with the Truth that I was not actually living the life I always wanted and was definitely not living the life I thought I had. One day, I was slammed in the gut with finding out that I did not have the marriage I thought I had on top of the knowing again the other 2 truths listed above, but I persisted. "I can take this. This is not too much for me....I don't want my kids to have a broken home", but I was so, so tragically blind to the fact that a broken home is all they had ever had.
I spent months digging my fingers as far as I could into the grip of insisting that the life I had could and would become the life I always wanted until one day I saw evidence of the broken family my kids had, and I couldn't ignore it anymore.
Once again I packed us up and I drove away from the life I always wanted, but this time was different. This time, I knew we were never going back. None of the people in our family were going to ever have the life I always wanted. It was gone forever.
One day I will be able to share the events leading up to and the day of one of the most excruciating days of my life that further redefined me in ways that still feel nothing short of corrupt. One day, but today is not that day. Today I want us to keep traveling THIS journey. We will travel that one later.
I'm inarticulate when I try to describe the experience of life being so horrific that you feel so numb that you feel like it's not you. You're not actually living this. You coast in the numbness until your thoughts reconnect well enough to silently ask yourself to recall the person to whom all this is happening and then it is emotional gunfire to your soul every single time you remember that its you. There is truth in qualifying one of the stages of grief to be denial. And it can be surprising even to yourself how long you stay there. Because you are so scared by the fire of whatever is happening that you're in shock and all the nerve ending have been burned away anyway.
I spent at least a full week in that shock because it wasn't just the marriage that I'd always wanted and the life I always wanted that I'd lost. I was now being robbed of the very thing that has been my driving force since the first moment I knew I was with child. I was now living the reality that I no longer even had the motherhood that I'd always wanted.
I have spent now half a decade demanding God to give me answers. I have yelled his name in the solitude of my home - in the floor again - just wanting truth. There are things I know for a fact that will always be true. We should always fight for what is right and we should pursue justice and we should share truth, but I had the same question over and over and over again. When, God????? When are you going to give me the life I always wanted? Why would you let that all be ripped away from me when I did nothing to warrant such a punishment???
I took my knowledge of the needing to fight for what is right, but I paired it, once again, with my insistence for this very specific set of circumstances that build out this one thing - this painfully specific idea of....the life I always wanted. And if God let all those parts be ripped away from my grieving hands, then He would put them back. "God, are you going to give that part back?" And every single time, I have heard "Yes. I will" from the Voice who has never broken His word. "Okay well when?....Can you tell me when so I can feel relief? Will you tell me when?" For years, my panicked spirit has begged again. Silence. "Okay well, if you're not going to tell me when, tell me HOW. Because I can do really good things with the strength and relief of at least knowing how. Just tell me how....is this how? Like could this be a way?" Silence.
At various points in my journey, my very weary and battered and bruised and thirsty and empty soul would say "Do I keep fighting?....am I supposed to be in this battle? Because this looks really impossible and I don't even think you give one thought to me....I don't matter.....I don't matter..." and the moment that my soul would run out, the silence would be broken with a powerful "You matter to me. I am willing to suffer every horror for you. Oh sweet baby, you matter....the war is far from over, but now.....now you rest behind my shield. Now, I FIGHT".
So I was able to grow to the point of trusting Him to fight on my behalf. I remember the day. I was sitting in this same spot in my living room but on a different couch, and I had become frustrated (but not for the last time) that I felt like I was spinning my wheels. Why had I not made up any ground? Why had things not been given back? He had promised me over and over again that things would be restored to me. What was I supposed to do to make that happen, and how bad was this going to get before it all would change? I had begun living my life paralyzed by the fear of more loss. Loss does that. I heard his voice in my soul again, but now He was doing the asking "When are you going to start trusting me more than you choose to be fearful of what a person can do to you???" I realized right away how badly I had hurt his heart. No. I realized a little bit of how badly I hurt His heart, and my soul answered immediately "Now." That marked the beginning of the end of fear. Yes. The end of fear is a journey, and I only just began it a couple years ago.
Convinced that I had mastered the lesson of this horrible battle of a trial through which God was allowing me to travel, I kept coming back to Him. "Can I be out of this now? I'm good. I will glorify you and do good with this. You can change my circumstances now and then I can get really strong and big and loud for you.....can you do it now?" Silence.
When God is silent, is He gone?
I will tell you that my angry and scared and exhausted and hurting soul has cried out so many times "God, are you even a thing???? If you're even a thing, I need you to show me. You show me right now!" A gentle response has followed every time "I AM and I love you desperately forever". So then I would ask again if I could be done with this horrid nightmare or what I needed to do to be done, and all I ever would get was "keep going. I will show you. Keep fighting. Stay close so you can hear me, and I will tell you".
I have now danced that dance for months upon months. I have now learned that God was not going to change my circumstances in order to let me recover and get big and strong because things being easy to carry is never how you get strong. No. You take those weights and you make yourself push into those weights every day. When you're strong enough to hold them up, you don't quit because you're muscles would actually weaken without the constant reintroduction of this heavy thing that feels just shy of all you've got. And then you add more. And then you are strong. God was getting me strong so I can change things - not changing things so I could chill out and magically acquire strength. That doesn't happen.
So I have now also spent months absorbing this truth, and I have continued to be like a pestering impatient child "Now?....okay what do you want me to do? What do I do?" His answer "Be still. And know that I AM God". "Okay I knew that. You know I already knew that" but the instructions there. Be still.
There are things you can do only if you are sitting still. When you are in mental motion, your attention lites on something just only long enough and then takes flight again to your next focus. I haven't wanted to be still because I didn't want to look. Because every time I HAD sat down to be still, it was my pain staring back at me. Pain of every dream I ever thought up being gutted and thrown back at my feet for me to stand there helpless while it bled out and died.
I began to read this book about being thankful. I read examples of people in Biblical accounts giving thanks in the midst of their trials. In fact, this author actually spends several pages elaborating on the idea that thanksgiving always precedes an actual miracle and we cannot be ready for the whole picture of what God has for us if we are living in the attitude of always wanting more or worse - turning up our noses in ingratitude at what we HAD been given. Goal oriented me saw it all spelled out. Choose to live in Thanksgiving and I will be ready for God to FINALLY give me the life I always wanted. Perfect. And I will praise Him and honor Him because, with all the time that has passed and all the attacks and robberies I have endured, the broken hearts of everyone who loves me will celebrate and praise God and anyone who hadn't known him before will be able to see really well how deeply he loves us.
I also gained understanding about being actively thankful during horrible things. I had always thought everyone meant that you were supposed to say "Thank you, God, for this really horrible thing happening to me. I know you are working it for my good" as if He had some sadistic satisfaction in creating us to grow best after he had taken off his hands of protection and then feel.glad while he watched us get pummelled. I really ALWAYS have struggled with how contradictory that was to everything else I knew about God. This author revealed to me that it's not the horrible injuries and tragedies for which we are to be thankful. It's that He doesn't want us to lose sight of the hope of good things that let's anything take away completely and that He will NEVER allow life to be devoid of beauty. That he will always have something - some secret reminder of hope to us like a Morse code signal that He is not dead and beauty is not gone. He will always make sure there is the presence of beauty no matter what, and He wants us to look for it around the pain that is so consuming of us.
I knew I had work to do there. I pride myself on not needing fancy or expensive anything. In fact, I would rather pay as little as possible for something to make sure I am getting the largest, most effective return for the money that was earned. But I have never liked my house, so I tried to begin practicing feeling content with it for right now...until God gives me the house for the life I always wanted. It's okay. I can handle it. I won't let it steal my joy just because I hate it because....I'm sure I'm going to get the life I always wanted.
Okay. Great! I'm also currently actively doing work to heal more injured parts of my soul. I am fast approaching being the healthiest version of myself I maybe have ever been. Okay let's do things to grow! I felt God telling me to get really brave and courageous and defy a bunch of negative things that had been planted in my brain that said I was limited. Not today!!!! Heh heh. Not today. So let's add some things to my life to grow because my numbers loving and ever budget conscious brain has done the math and you know what???? Here it is! All I have to get is XYZ, AND THERE IT IS! I JUST MIGHT BE THIS CLOSE TO THE LIFE I ALWAYS WANTED!
SLAM!! That is the sound of the door to the opportunities I sought. I crept slowly and got close enough to turn the knob and push the door ajar a few times only for it to slam shut again. "Why? What?...if I'm not supposed to be this thing I thought you were telling me to pursue, what am I supposed to do???" "Sit still" I heard again.
So still is where I have been forced to sit....for weeks. I have itched to be productive. I have cried in frustration. I have beaten myself up at how poorly I have done at being the person who could make things better - who could be the one to get to the place of having the life I always wanted. And here, He has sat with me, and today, I finally got it.
The life I always wanted was never the life that I will ever have because it's not the one I'm supposed to have! And I have been so preoccupied with trying to trudge my way into the wind towards a life that never existed. It was all fake. The idea I had that I was the person who was just displaced from the life I always wanted was a lie I forced myself to believe, and it has spent years yanking my gaze away from something very important.
This one.
I have spent all this time from the moment I first stood in the hallway all those years ago not realizing that God was never keeping me from good or keeping good from me. He wasn't denying me a life! Me not getting to live the life I always wanted was never God just leaving a vacuum that would eventually just suck up this construct of what I just KNEW would be really great and then the hole would be permanently repaired!
He was never not giving me a life. The whole entire time....He was giving me this one. This finally hit me today, and, for the first time in 13 years, I saw it. Complete. It was like somebody cleared away the debris that had been hiding a treasure this whole time! This life - the one I've always had, was never less. It was never less than. It isn't worse. It isn't harder. The one I always wanted was never better...than this one.
I have spent this day blinking open my new eyes, and I see it - restoration after robbery, opportunity after injustice, beauty...for all those ashes. And I just feel like... aw man. How was I missing this???? How was I not noticing what this was just because it was packaged differently that what I was looking for?
I was never a failure. I was never alone. I was never done. I was never purposeless. I was never dead. I was never ruined. None of this was ever ruined because, in the midst of all the things that hurt and in the midst of all my heartbreak of never, ever getting to have the life I always wanted, God sent a vein of beauty to shoot straight through the middle and spring up a thing I'd never expect to find - THIS life! The one I was always meant to have. And this one...is even better.
I am reading a book by a woman who, unlike most (especially Christian) authors, does not write from a place where "struggle" is the mental and emotional pressure you place on yourself as you almost wish a life of spiritual abundance on other people whilst you sit smiling listening to a poor, battered soul share trials and pain for which you have no point of reference. I know plenty of women in ministry who get their hands dirty and who have lived real life, but it seems that precious few of them are authors. Rather, I have read in great supply, women who relate minor unhappinesses as "ways God was growin me!!!". It has been offputting to me to be offered some trite comfort by a soul sitting in privilege.
This book and this author have been very different, and so it has lowered my guard and allowed my heart to listen to what she has to say. It is easy to preach and live thankfulness when your life has not included much loss. You don't even ever need to have lived a fancy moment in your life. If your days and plans even closely resemble convention at all, most everything you face as a struggle can be brushed aside like a hair that has fallen from your coiffed circumstances. If you want me to listen to advice you have to offer, it is just true for me that I need to know that you know what loss feels like - significant loss a significant number of times. I have seen the reflection of that in this author, and so I have been willing to read and have quite an evolution of my thoughts.
When I say to you that I have been my whole life a rule follower, I need you to know that it is a painfully obvious trait of my character. And it was actually never from the origin of not wanting to upset people. It actually registered very early in my heart that deviating from the structure provided to you by people who loved you could cause them to be hurt. I found that type of hurt to be so purposeless that I, even still, very highly value a well thought out rule. Additionally, I experienced that the following closely of rules actually evoked very positive feelings from other people which rolled right into positive experiences for me. One of those positive results was and still is the freedom to make some choices for myself and the granting of requests I had because I also have usually been astute enough to realize what was reasonable.
So I did this. I built a very reasonable life construct in my head that didn't just allow for, but centered around devotion to the God who loves me. None of this seemed weird, and I had found myself even allowing for the absense of some of the things that were hard and fast requirements for some of my constituents. I didn't feel like I was settling in any way by passing these things by. I felt really excited about the life I wanted so much that I didn't want those things anyway.
Then came the day that I got the life I wanted. 5 months and 1 day after our first date, I married the Marine who had swept me off my feet during his Christmas leave. By this point, NOTHING in my life story and fairy tale looked like those of the other girls, but I loved mine. It was as colorful and unique as I have always been. No part of me felt cheated by it. I almost felt proud of myself for that. In fact, my heart willingly and excitedly accepted the role of support I could provide to the man I loved the moment he told me that "It gives me somebody to come back to...somebody to fight for.....it would just...give me that 'at ease' feeling" for us getting married before he left for a deployment into combat. It was happening in a very meandering way, but it was happening - the life I wanted.
The moment - the exact moment, where I stood, what I was wearing, which lights were on in the direction I was facing and most especially how it felt when I realized that the life I had was not the one I wanted. I had stepped right into a life that was nowhere near the life I wanted. "oh....no.....what have I done? We are married now. I have married him. This is my life....how long am I going to have to do this? How long CAN I do this?" all screamed through my brain in almost an instant.
My parents were the epitome of commitment. Their life together was not all romance, but their perseverence and complete and utter commitment to each other was the stuff of the most romantic notions you'll ever hear. They "loved each other through" some really high hurdles. I watched it happen. Some of these happened outside the window of my ability to recall, but I remember a lot of them, so I just drew from that. I was just going to love "through" the things in front of me that looked like challenges, and then my husband and I would have the same example and the same romance to show to the world and to the children that hadn't even been thought of yet.
I was 9 weeks pregnant when the father of that baby left for what would be his last deployment for the Marine Corps. I spent from late fall to mid spring praying over him and doing everything I could to make him proud and happy to come home while our sweet little first born grew under my heart. He came home without a scratch anyone could see, and then our baby was born. Life almost immediately began yanking me further and further away from the life I wanted and the one I thought I had.
I fought. I fought really hard. I would spend almost every evening with my laptop on my knees researching strategies I could use to yank my dream back from the clutches of life which I was now realizing could be cruel to a depth I didn't know existed. Then, I don't even know how many times, I would wait for everyone else in my house to be asleep and I would lay totally flat on the floor of my living room, and I would pray. I would literally beg the God of the Universe to fix and restore the life that I always wanted. I would beg and I would cry, and I would cry until the carpet was soaked under where the tears fell from the end of my nose.
There were glimpses over the next couple of years that gave me a hope that was nothing more than an apparition, and so those glimpses would dissipate just as quickly as they'd smoked their way up in front of my gaze until one day I realized that I had no choice but to suspend my dream of the life I always wanted. I packed a couple of bags of clothes and then scooped up now two children and put them into the backseat of the cab of my brother's truck, and I rode away from the life I always wanted and the life I thought I had or was at least going to get.
It is a surreal thing to see the words "irretrievably broken" printed on a paper that is public record and for those two words to be what is the final description of a dream you spent your whole life building. Somewhere during the litigation and processing of paperwork and mediation and court dates, I felt so turned around. I felt like my whole world was on a tilt-a-whirl at a fair and the operator had just decided to leave while I spun until I was sick. I couldn't figure out what to pray for, so I just sat in my sister's bedroom chair and thought about what I wanted. "I just want to know the truth because I don't even know who to believe about anything anymore including myself." So I postured myself in the same way I had really countless times before, and I begged the God of the Universe to focus attention on me and show me truth, and then I prayed that God give me back the life I always wanted, and I will never forget the clarity with which I heard his voice in the ear of my deepest heart.
"No."
This is another life moment that is seared into my consciousness. I am honestly still a little dumbstruck, but God's answer to a request I found to be, not just reasonable but beneficial even, was a very hard "no". Also in that moment of such clear answer, I couldn't help but admit to myself that I'd actually been being given that answer for a really long time. In fact, I knew I'd been hearing it every single one of all of those nights with my nose pressed into the carpet.
As pen scratched across paper leaving the ink of our initials on the very paperwork that was proof that almost the whole of my identity was changed, I was properly introduced to Hope. Because when everything of the life you wanted and everything of the life you had gets completely erased with just paperwork, hope is really all you've got left. That is where you realize that hope has got to be your starting place.
Now, as I have learned from spending years with a philopher, every trait is a spectrum of virtue and vice, and it is totally our own choice of where we would like to fall. I feel comfortable in admitting that I have a measure of tenacity that rivals really a lot of other people. The phrase "I would have quit way before you did" is very familiar to me. As is obvious, there can be great virtue with this. Persevering through difficulty or weariness can yield amazing things with amazing influence for good. It's just also true that this spectrum of tenacity also has a pole of vice, and that vice is stubbornness. Examples of this in my life don't so much include my insisitence to get my way in interactions with other people. It's just that I sort of carried with me that persistence to keep chasing and keep asking for the very thing about which I had been told "no". While I had accepted that God had said "no", I really hadn't accepted that it would be a permanent "no".
Some choices in your life present with their origin very clearly like "I should never have bought that car that was outside my budget" or "I think I'm going to go to school closer to home next semester. They have a better program at ___" or "I really hate this job. There's not a reason for me to keep working here". Relationships are seldom that cut and dry. There are almost always intricacies that are knit through what makes sense and what seems advantageous or good as many as there are ones that are woven way outside what we can see as good for us. And you know, I really spent every moment away from the life I always wanted still wanting that specific life that I wanted, so I jumped at the very first chance I was given to "try again" and "make it work". One truth about me is, you cannot out-love me. You may love equally, but I will let someone walk all over me and treat me like dirt and do that for a long time before I sever ties. I just would rather love, so being presented with the opportunity to do that with the idea of all of that being reciprocated was like music to me. I will tell you this: hindsight being 20\20, I will never know in this life if the reconciliation effort for my marriage was "supposed to happen", but I do know this - that time gave me one of my greatest life treasures. About a year after we all moved back into one house, the uncharacteristic queesiness I felt after reading a book from my seat on a road trip inspired me to pee on a little plastic stick that showed me fast that baby number 3 was growing under my heart. Upon learning that baby would be a girl, I found it the right thing to do to bestow upon her the middle name "Hope" - the very thing from whence she was conceived.
A few months into my pregnancy, I agreed to move away from my home and away from my family. Wise people begged me not to, but I wanted to sustain the happiness I felt. Rejecting this request made me worry that the happiness would end, and gone, back into the ghostly smoke would float the life I always wanted. And so everything from inside our house went onto a truck, and we drove way from my home.
It happened to me again - that question "what have I done?". With the passing of not much time at all, I was reacquainted with the Truth that I was not actually living the life I always wanted and was definitely not living the life I thought I had. One day, I was slammed in the gut with finding out that I did not have the marriage I thought I had on top of the knowing again the other 2 truths listed above, but I persisted. "I can take this. This is not too much for me....I don't want my kids to have a broken home", but I was so, so tragically blind to the fact that a broken home is all they had ever had.
I spent months digging my fingers as far as I could into the grip of insisting that the life I had could and would become the life I always wanted until one day I saw evidence of the broken family my kids had, and I couldn't ignore it anymore.
Once again I packed us up and I drove away from the life I always wanted, but this time was different. This time, I knew we were never going back. None of the people in our family were going to ever have the life I always wanted. It was gone forever.
One day I will be able to share the events leading up to and the day of one of the most excruciating days of my life that further redefined me in ways that still feel nothing short of corrupt. One day, but today is not that day. Today I want us to keep traveling THIS journey. We will travel that one later.
I'm inarticulate when I try to describe the experience of life being so horrific that you feel so numb that you feel like it's not you. You're not actually living this. You coast in the numbness until your thoughts reconnect well enough to silently ask yourself to recall the person to whom all this is happening and then it is emotional gunfire to your soul every single time you remember that its you. There is truth in qualifying one of the stages of grief to be denial. And it can be surprising even to yourself how long you stay there. Because you are so scared by the fire of whatever is happening that you're in shock and all the nerve ending have been burned away anyway.
I spent at least a full week in that shock because it wasn't just the marriage that I'd always wanted and the life I always wanted that I'd lost. I was now being robbed of the very thing that has been my driving force since the first moment I knew I was with child. I was now living the reality that I no longer even had the motherhood that I'd always wanted.
I have spent now half a decade demanding God to give me answers. I have yelled his name in the solitude of my home - in the floor again - just wanting truth. There are things I know for a fact that will always be true. We should always fight for what is right and we should pursue justice and we should share truth, but I had the same question over and over and over again. When, God????? When are you going to give me the life I always wanted? Why would you let that all be ripped away from me when I did nothing to warrant such a punishment???
I took my knowledge of the needing to fight for what is right, but I paired it, once again, with my insistence for this very specific set of circumstances that build out this one thing - this painfully specific idea of....the life I always wanted. And if God let all those parts be ripped away from my grieving hands, then He would put them back. "God, are you going to give that part back?" And every single time, I have heard "Yes. I will" from the Voice who has never broken His word. "Okay well when?....Can you tell me when so I can feel relief? Will you tell me when?" For years, my panicked spirit has begged again. Silence. "Okay well, if you're not going to tell me when, tell me HOW. Because I can do really good things with the strength and relief of at least knowing how. Just tell me how....is this how? Like could this be a way?" Silence.
At various points in my journey, my very weary and battered and bruised and thirsty and empty soul would say "Do I keep fighting?....am I supposed to be in this battle? Because this looks really impossible and I don't even think you give one thought to me....I don't matter.....I don't matter..." and the moment that my soul would run out, the silence would be broken with a powerful "You matter to me. I am willing to suffer every horror for you. Oh sweet baby, you matter....the war is far from over, but now.....now you rest behind my shield. Now, I FIGHT".
So I was able to grow to the point of trusting Him to fight on my behalf. I remember the day. I was sitting in this same spot in my living room but on a different couch, and I had become frustrated (but not for the last time) that I felt like I was spinning my wheels. Why had I not made up any ground? Why had things not been given back? He had promised me over and over again that things would be restored to me. What was I supposed to do to make that happen, and how bad was this going to get before it all would change? I had begun living my life paralyzed by the fear of more loss. Loss does that. I heard his voice in my soul again, but now He was doing the asking "When are you going to start trusting me more than you choose to be fearful of what a person can do to you???" I realized right away how badly I had hurt his heart. No. I realized a little bit of how badly I hurt His heart, and my soul answered immediately "Now." That marked the beginning of the end of fear. Yes. The end of fear is a journey, and I only just began it a couple years ago.
Convinced that I had mastered the lesson of this horrible battle of a trial through which God was allowing me to travel, I kept coming back to Him. "Can I be out of this now? I'm good. I will glorify you and do good with this. You can change my circumstances now and then I can get really strong and big and loud for you.....can you do it now?" Silence.
When God is silent, is He gone?
I will tell you that my angry and scared and exhausted and hurting soul has cried out so many times "God, are you even a thing???? If you're even a thing, I need you to show me. You show me right now!" A gentle response has followed every time "I AM and I love you desperately forever". So then I would ask again if I could be done with this horrid nightmare or what I needed to do to be done, and all I ever would get was "keep going. I will show you. Keep fighting. Stay close so you can hear me, and I will tell you".
I have now danced that dance for months upon months. I have now learned that God was not going to change my circumstances in order to let me recover and get big and strong because things being easy to carry is never how you get strong. No. You take those weights and you make yourself push into those weights every day. When you're strong enough to hold them up, you don't quit because you're muscles would actually weaken without the constant reintroduction of this heavy thing that feels just shy of all you've got. And then you add more. And then you are strong. God was getting me strong so I can change things - not changing things so I could chill out and magically acquire strength. That doesn't happen.
So I have now also spent months absorbing this truth, and I have continued to be like a pestering impatient child "Now?....okay what do you want me to do? What do I do?" His answer "Be still. And know that I AM God". "Okay I knew that. You know I already knew that" but the instructions there. Be still.
There are things you can do only if you are sitting still. When you are in mental motion, your attention lites on something just only long enough and then takes flight again to your next focus. I haven't wanted to be still because I didn't want to look. Because every time I HAD sat down to be still, it was my pain staring back at me. Pain of every dream I ever thought up being gutted and thrown back at my feet for me to stand there helpless while it bled out and died.
I began to read this book about being thankful. I read examples of people in Biblical accounts giving thanks in the midst of their trials. In fact, this author actually spends several pages elaborating on the idea that thanksgiving always precedes an actual miracle and we cannot be ready for the whole picture of what God has for us if we are living in the attitude of always wanting more or worse - turning up our noses in ingratitude at what we HAD been given. Goal oriented me saw it all spelled out. Choose to live in Thanksgiving and I will be ready for God to FINALLY give me the life I always wanted. Perfect. And I will praise Him and honor Him because, with all the time that has passed and all the attacks and robberies I have endured, the broken hearts of everyone who loves me will celebrate and praise God and anyone who hadn't known him before will be able to see really well how deeply he loves us.
I also gained understanding about being actively thankful during horrible things. I had always thought everyone meant that you were supposed to say "Thank you, God, for this really horrible thing happening to me. I know you are working it for my good" as if He had some sadistic satisfaction in creating us to grow best after he had taken off his hands of protection and then feel.glad while he watched us get pummelled. I really ALWAYS have struggled with how contradictory that was to everything else I knew about God. This author revealed to me that it's not the horrible injuries and tragedies for which we are to be thankful. It's that He doesn't want us to lose sight of the hope of good things that let's anything take away completely and that He will NEVER allow life to be devoid of beauty. That he will always have something - some secret reminder of hope to us like a Morse code signal that He is not dead and beauty is not gone. He will always make sure there is the presence of beauty no matter what, and He wants us to look for it around the pain that is so consuming of us.
I knew I had work to do there. I pride myself on not needing fancy or expensive anything. In fact, I would rather pay as little as possible for something to make sure I am getting the largest, most effective return for the money that was earned. But I have never liked my house, so I tried to begin practicing feeling content with it for right now...until God gives me the house for the life I always wanted. It's okay. I can handle it. I won't let it steal my joy just because I hate it because....I'm sure I'm going to get the life I always wanted.
Okay. Great! I'm also currently actively doing work to heal more injured parts of my soul. I am fast approaching being the healthiest version of myself I maybe have ever been. Okay let's do things to grow! I felt God telling me to get really brave and courageous and defy a bunch of negative things that had been planted in my brain that said I was limited. Not today!!!! Heh heh. Not today. So let's add some things to my life to grow because my numbers loving and ever budget conscious brain has done the math and you know what???? Here it is! All I have to get is XYZ, AND THERE IT IS! I JUST MIGHT BE THIS CLOSE TO THE LIFE I ALWAYS WANTED!
SLAM!! That is the sound of the door to the opportunities I sought. I crept slowly and got close enough to turn the knob and push the door ajar a few times only for it to slam shut again. "Why? What?...if I'm not supposed to be this thing I thought you were telling me to pursue, what am I supposed to do???" "Sit still" I heard again.
So still is where I have been forced to sit....for weeks. I have itched to be productive. I have cried in frustration. I have beaten myself up at how poorly I have done at being the person who could make things better - who could be the one to get to the place of having the life I always wanted. And here, He has sat with me, and today, I finally got it.
The life I always wanted was never the life that I will ever have because it's not the one I'm supposed to have! And I have been so preoccupied with trying to trudge my way into the wind towards a life that never existed. It was all fake. The idea I had that I was the person who was just displaced from the life I always wanted was a lie I forced myself to believe, and it has spent years yanking my gaze away from something very important.
This one.
I have spent all this time from the moment I first stood in the hallway all those years ago not realizing that God was never keeping me from good or keeping good from me. He wasn't denying me a life! Me not getting to live the life I always wanted was never God just leaving a vacuum that would eventually just suck up this construct of what I just KNEW would be really great and then the hole would be permanently repaired!
He was never not giving me a life. The whole entire time....He was giving me this one. This finally hit me today, and, for the first time in 13 years, I saw it. Complete. It was like somebody cleared away the debris that had been hiding a treasure this whole time! This life - the one I've always had, was never less. It was never less than. It isn't worse. It isn't harder. The one I always wanted was never better...than this one.
I have spent this day blinking open my new eyes, and I see it - restoration after robbery, opportunity after injustice, beauty...for all those ashes. And I just feel like... aw man. How was I missing this???? How was I not noticing what this was just because it was packaged differently that what I was looking for?
I was never a failure. I was never alone. I was never done. I was never purposeless. I was never dead. I was never ruined. None of this was ever ruined because, in the midst of all the things that hurt and in the midst of all my heartbreak of never, ever getting to have the life I always wanted, God sent a vein of beauty to shoot straight through the middle and spring up a thing I'd never expect to find - THIS life! The one I was always meant to have. And this one...is even better.
Wednesday, June 6, 2018
On D-Day
As a younger girl, I heard my mom talk about a girl who wrote a diary and then she died, and her diary was published and my mom had read it. I wanted to read it. It was from decades before I was even born, and she wrote it during a war! "When you're a little older" my mom said.
As a younger girl, I heard my dad tell us about our German heritage and something about Germans killings Jews and that made him always feel so sad that it was "our people" who had done such a horrible thing.
I read that diary. Then I learned about how the whole world went to war because of these German people hating Jews and other people of color. I was disgusted.
Walking through a bookstore my mom points to a book "Oh this is the story of a woman who hid Jews during the war, and she had to go live in a concentration camp for it...there's a movie too". "Can I read it?" I asked having now felt a hunger for information on everything surrounding this period in time. "Yeah" she said. And so I did. Then we watched the movie as a family. That's when my dad said the thing about being German and I connected to this some faint memory of visiting his German born grandmother when I was little.
As a grown woman I sat at a kitchen table as I learned that, after this young girl married an American bugler who's heart went ugly and died but who's name I carry as my identity even now, helped the allies gain insight into the land where she'd learned to walk but away from which she'd had to flee. She aided in providing them with such things they could not learn without the mental tour of a native born.
In these younger days, roots of realization plunged their way down into my soul: there was true, unadulterated evil rampant in humanity and I had begun to understand not just what some of it could look like but that it was, indeed, my people that had begun such horror for one part. I began to develop a self awareness that I should dare not EVER esteem myself higher than another - for the truth exists that my genetic proximity to evil is just too dangerous a game for me to play. Pride destroys, and if my own people were not just capable but culpable, then I, by reasonable logic, could also be the same.
For the rest of my adolescence and some years after, my mind devoured any information I could find about all this. Something in me knew it was important. Something was needed for me to know it, and it wasn't just morbid curiosity although I definitely lived some shock as I read volume after volume of horrors that seemed so awful they had to be fake or their tellers had to be lying.
I just filed it all away growing less conscious of it but carrying it with me every step that I tread through my own journey of time. At any point that I ever saw injustice, it would fly to the front of my consciousness again giving power to my passion and purpose to my words - sometimes spoken, sometimes written, but this mostly lay dormant.
Until it didn't.
On a day I can't recount because I cannot mark it with specificity, I heard the voices of these women in my heart. I felt their strength flex in the muscles of my own body. I sensed and shared their hope and resolve. I hadn't realized they'd given me these things, moreover I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would need them, but I did. I never knew that evil could not just exist but stare me in the face with eyes so empty, my blood ran cold. I never knew that people's lies could ever be so convincing that knowing souls would choose to turn their heads rather than bloody their hands for my sake. I never knew I would stand on a patch of dirty floor in a building that was far from my home and realize that I was alone. No one who loved me could get to me to help. They were hundreds of miles away. They couldn't get to me now.
I was alone.
And then I felt it. I felt the truth of the words scrawled across paper by the hands of Anne Frank give me wind to push out of my lungs to speak a voice I'd thought was forever silenced. I felt the sheer perseverance of Corrie Ten Boom - my absolute supreme human hero - cause the muscles of my once weakened spirit squeeze together to push me up onto my feet and walk more steps on my way to the land of stability. I felt the mind and choice of Margaret Schaefer push around all the thoughts of things I knew to help put the pieces right and make things change. And so we traveled together. For years.
I thought that I had learned my lessons well enough that evil in my tiny world would be vanquished and peace would reign for the rest of time as I knew it.
SMACK! The slap of evil struck me when I wasn't ready. Looking around in my world while the skin still stung, I tried to find the eyes of those I knew who had seen this truth happen and I saw a bunch of turned heads and squeaky clean hands.
SMACK! My skin stung again. SMACK! The slaps grew into punches as my life grew more and more bruised until I lay weeping in my kitchen floor as I scorned God and begged for His mercy in the same sob. I felt sure my pleading and the truth of who I'd chosen to be would have God reach down and sort things out so justice would have it's way and peace would be more than a fantasy. No. Evil kicked as I lie there in a heap shoving it's steel toed force deeper into my soul's already broken ribs.
I couldn't get up. I had nothing left. How could evil be this strong? How could God, MY God - my Abba, let this continue?! How could so many whose words could right things in a blink so comfortably turn their heads and drown out the sound of my sobs with the noise of their own comfort?
Where was God? How could this be? What did I matter? What purpose was there for me here? How could I have ever viewed myself as the daughter of a King - a princess? How could I be such a fool? Why should I ever try ever again? What could my life ever even be?
And then the borrowed memories of their written words and spoken stories courses their way over the dusty lies being spoken in my soul. I saw Anne never losing sight for the sunshine despite having been thrust into a world of dismal grey. I saw my widowed great grandmother sitting in her home choosing to answer the questions of men she'd never met and making the choice to betray a world that held evil in its hands at the cost of her own family.
And then I heard Carrie's voice. As far as I've ever been aware, there are no existing audio recordings of the voices of Anne Frank or my great grandmother, but we have those treasures for the voice of Corrie Ten Boom. I thought about all her time of hiding Jews in her own home to the grueling periods of her time in work camps that claimed her whole family, and I thought "No. No. Nothing in my life - as broken as my heart is and will always stay and as devastated and confused as I feel about evil having such freedom to roam at my life's expense, I will NEVER know the horrors and the pain and the hate that had to be overcome by the people who endured these things. So if Corrie was able to come to the point of saying that God's love was stronger than her hate and choose to pray for vile men and women who cost her everything she held dear with a cruelty I will never see, then I must follow that example.
On this day 74 years ago, while all of the oppressed still suffered under the weight of evil, completely unbeknownst to them, the boots of the allies scraped their way into the sand of the beach of Normandy. Armed with weaponry and strategy far superior to anything the enemy had in hand, the conquered the battle, and the push of each boot across the ground began to change the landcape Of everything that was about to follow. While in their racks full of disease and lice and death, these souls held within their future the vanquishing of their oppression. They couldn't hear it or see it or know it, but it was on the way because D-Day happened. After that day, evil was held at bay while the doors of these prisons were swung open and people were allowed to once again build a life!
I cannot help but see the parable here for myself. I am humbled at the thought that I could personally apply any portion of this to my own existence, but I feel like I would be remiss if I did not.
I cannot see only the evil. I cannot choose only the hate. I cannot narrow my gaze so close that all I see is where I stand right now with the shackles on my heart and life and the disease of all I've lost. I cannot believe the lie that my Father has left me to die. Corrie and so many others lived through these things and chose to asxhew the miopathy of their present pain, and it's so good that they did, because just as true as it was that allied forces invaded and overtook the foothold of the evil then and changed history for it, I also do not now know what battles my Father wages on my behalf. He promises to do it. So dare I do this and choose to be a servant of His hope? Dare I choose to live believing the promise that this is not the last chapter to my own history? Do I square my shoulders with this knowledge that my own D-Day is coming because, as a royal heir, I stand promised that truth?
It could go either way, I guess. I could choose either one, but if Corrie Ten Boom has tread a path more treacherous, then I can be honored to tread the one I'm on.
As a younger girl, I heard my dad tell us about our German heritage and something about Germans killings Jews and that made him always feel so sad that it was "our people" who had done such a horrible thing.
I read that diary. Then I learned about how the whole world went to war because of these German people hating Jews and other people of color. I was disgusted.
Walking through a bookstore my mom points to a book "Oh this is the story of a woman who hid Jews during the war, and she had to go live in a concentration camp for it...there's a movie too". "Can I read it?" I asked having now felt a hunger for information on everything surrounding this period in time. "Yeah" she said. And so I did. Then we watched the movie as a family. That's when my dad said the thing about being German and I connected to this some faint memory of visiting his German born grandmother when I was little.
As a grown woman I sat at a kitchen table as I learned that, after this young girl married an American bugler who's heart went ugly and died but who's name I carry as my identity even now, helped the allies gain insight into the land where she'd learned to walk but away from which she'd had to flee. She aided in providing them with such things they could not learn without the mental tour of a native born.
In these younger days, roots of realization plunged their way down into my soul: there was true, unadulterated evil rampant in humanity and I had begun to understand not just what some of it could look like but that it was, indeed, my people that had begun such horror for one part. I began to develop a self awareness that I should dare not EVER esteem myself higher than another - for the truth exists that my genetic proximity to evil is just too dangerous a game for me to play. Pride destroys, and if my own people were not just capable but culpable, then I, by reasonable logic, could also be the same.
For the rest of my adolescence and some years after, my mind devoured any information I could find about all this. Something in me knew it was important. Something was needed for me to know it, and it wasn't just morbid curiosity although I definitely lived some shock as I read volume after volume of horrors that seemed so awful they had to be fake or their tellers had to be lying.
I just filed it all away growing less conscious of it but carrying it with me every step that I tread through my own journey of time. At any point that I ever saw injustice, it would fly to the front of my consciousness again giving power to my passion and purpose to my words - sometimes spoken, sometimes written, but this mostly lay dormant.
Until it didn't.
On a day I can't recount because I cannot mark it with specificity, I heard the voices of these women in my heart. I felt their strength flex in the muscles of my own body. I sensed and shared their hope and resolve. I hadn't realized they'd given me these things, moreover I never in my wildest dreams imagined that I would need them, but I did. I never knew that evil could not just exist but stare me in the face with eyes so empty, my blood ran cold. I never knew that people's lies could ever be so convincing that knowing souls would choose to turn their heads rather than bloody their hands for my sake. I never knew I would stand on a patch of dirty floor in a building that was far from my home and realize that I was alone. No one who loved me could get to me to help. They were hundreds of miles away. They couldn't get to me now.
I was alone.
And then I felt it. I felt the truth of the words scrawled across paper by the hands of Anne Frank give me wind to push out of my lungs to speak a voice I'd thought was forever silenced. I felt the sheer perseverance of Corrie Ten Boom - my absolute supreme human hero - cause the muscles of my once weakened spirit squeeze together to push me up onto my feet and walk more steps on my way to the land of stability. I felt the mind and choice of Margaret Schaefer push around all the thoughts of things I knew to help put the pieces right and make things change. And so we traveled together. For years.
I thought that I had learned my lessons well enough that evil in my tiny world would be vanquished and peace would reign for the rest of time as I knew it.
SMACK! The slap of evil struck me when I wasn't ready. Looking around in my world while the skin still stung, I tried to find the eyes of those I knew who had seen this truth happen and I saw a bunch of turned heads and squeaky clean hands.
SMACK! My skin stung again. SMACK! The slaps grew into punches as my life grew more and more bruised until I lay weeping in my kitchen floor as I scorned God and begged for His mercy in the same sob. I felt sure my pleading and the truth of who I'd chosen to be would have God reach down and sort things out so justice would have it's way and peace would be more than a fantasy. No. Evil kicked as I lie there in a heap shoving it's steel toed force deeper into my soul's already broken ribs.
I couldn't get up. I had nothing left. How could evil be this strong? How could God, MY God - my Abba, let this continue?! How could so many whose words could right things in a blink so comfortably turn their heads and drown out the sound of my sobs with the noise of their own comfort?
Where was God? How could this be? What did I matter? What purpose was there for me here? How could I have ever viewed myself as the daughter of a King - a princess? How could I be such a fool? Why should I ever try ever again? What could my life ever even be?
And then the borrowed memories of their written words and spoken stories courses their way over the dusty lies being spoken in my soul. I saw Anne never losing sight for the sunshine despite having been thrust into a world of dismal grey. I saw my widowed great grandmother sitting in her home choosing to answer the questions of men she'd never met and making the choice to betray a world that held evil in its hands at the cost of her own family.
And then I heard Carrie's voice. As far as I've ever been aware, there are no existing audio recordings of the voices of Anne Frank or my great grandmother, but we have those treasures for the voice of Corrie Ten Boom. I thought about all her time of hiding Jews in her own home to the grueling periods of her time in work camps that claimed her whole family, and I thought "No. No. Nothing in my life - as broken as my heart is and will always stay and as devastated and confused as I feel about evil having such freedom to roam at my life's expense, I will NEVER know the horrors and the pain and the hate that had to be overcome by the people who endured these things. So if Corrie was able to come to the point of saying that God's love was stronger than her hate and choose to pray for vile men and women who cost her everything she held dear with a cruelty I will never see, then I must follow that example.
On this day 74 years ago, while all of the oppressed still suffered under the weight of evil, completely unbeknownst to them, the boots of the allies scraped their way into the sand of the beach of Normandy. Armed with weaponry and strategy far superior to anything the enemy had in hand, the conquered the battle, and the push of each boot across the ground began to change the landcape Of everything that was about to follow. While in their racks full of disease and lice and death, these souls held within their future the vanquishing of their oppression. They couldn't hear it or see it or know it, but it was on the way because D-Day happened. After that day, evil was held at bay while the doors of these prisons were swung open and people were allowed to once again build a life!
I cannot help but see the parable here for myself. I am humbled at the thought that I could personally apply any portion of this to my own existence, but I feel like I would be remiss if I did not.
I cannot see only the evil. I cannot choose only the hate. I cannot narrow my gaze so close that all I see is where I stand right now with the shackles on my heart and life and the disease of all I've lost. I cannot believe the lie that my Father has left me to die. Corrie and so many others lived through these things and chose to asxhew the miopathy of their present pain, and it's so good that they did, because just as true as it was that allied forces invaded and overtook the foothold of the evil then and changed history for it, I also do not now know what battles my Father wages on my behalf. He promises to do it. So dare I do this and choose to be a servant of His hope? Dare I choose to live believing the promise that this is not the last chapter to my own history? Do I square my shoulders with this knowledge that my own D-Day is coming because, as a royal heir, I stand promised that truth?
It could go either way, I guess. I could choose either one, but if Corrie Ten Boom has tread a path more treacherous, then I can be honored to tread the one I'm on.
Tuesday, May 8, 2018
On Living in This Moment
At the tender young age of 31, I was formally diagnosed with ADHD. This is a brain function about which people hear a lot, but really not a lot of people understand. It's simple in some ways and really complex in most others. If I were to offer an explanation so brief it borders on crass, I would offer you this: we live in a world of lists. Whether we make them willingly or not or whether we make them consciously or not doesn't matter. Those lists are there. A neuro-typical brain (yep - mine is physically wired differently) will see their world of lists and begin to prioritize each item and complete tasks as they are able and willing. If you are an ADHD brain, you see your list, but the tasks on it don't step into line...like not at all, depending on your severity. Then, the hard part is, not only do you see your current list as one big blob of "need to do", but you think about past lists you didn't complete AND future lists....all at the same time.
Gets very noisy, my friends. Not literal noise. It's like noise in your focus not in your ears. So I require some extra things to help me quiet my brain and force the mental connections that can't happen on their own. I have been repairing this part of my life with fervor recently, and something just struck me. The thing that can be the greatest theft in the life and mind of someone with ADHD is the ability to live in...this...moment.
I remember being in high school and my dad getting so frustrated with me that he said "Sarah! You don't have to worry about EVERYTHING!" True but incomplete. I SHOULDN'T worry about everything, but I kind of didn't have a choice. He wasn't frustrated with me. He was frustrated FOR me because he could see that I was completely caught up in finding solutions for problems that didn't even yet exist. I distinctly remember feeling frustrated for the sake of the neighborhood where we lived and mapping out a plan for its revitalization....I was 15. I shake my head now, but my diagnosis at 31 helped give a lot of context.
But I'm here now. I'm not 15 anymore. I'm old enough to be the parent of someone at least that old. I'm not a person sloshing through futility with the mud of my lists and plans and dreams and concerns. I'm learning now, and will until I'm dead, how to let my brain sit and organize all the puzzle pieces so they make a picture instead of a mess. Some of my learning has been in realizing that I am able to engage the beauty and purpose of this moment - just this one.
I am a very typical type A. I'm very driven. I'm a multiple time entrepreneur (1st go around I co owned a web design firm with my dad. Lots of free lance makeup work. Current pursuit is my store). I...do not give up. Stubborn. Iron will. Whatever you want to call it. (My husband is an iron will as well. Iron sharpens iron is never more true than in our home. Oh life...you are a funny thing, yes?)
Sidenote: above are all very prevalent characteristics of people with ADHD. So if your child is failing classes, doesn't focus enough to do well in school and seems to be chaos personified, take a seat and let your heart slow down. She's gonna be just fine, honey. She's gonna rise up and push till she gets what she wants. You just teach her how to figure out what it is that she wants!...also get a psychiatrist to help. Listen there are experts in this field for a reason, and if your brain functions differently than 93% of the reported human population, there is nothing run of the mill about you. You (or your child) are going to need the help of an expert. What you have is rare and precious. Treat it as such.
Now with all this tenacity comes, like I said, a very busy mind. If we learn how to harness it, we do realize that we have this moment, and there is beauty in it.
I used to think of "living in the moment" as having a cast of very selfish hedonism over it. Really sort of lumping together "living IN the moment" and "living FOR the moment". I'm a bit sad now that I did that, but I have discovered that I have more chances, right?
So I'm beginning to live life differently. I'm not just quieting my mind. I am aggressively eliminating noise. If there is something that does not grow my spirit or actually attacks it, I cut it out. I disallow it. Listen some of this is hard. Negative self talk that was supplied to you from a place of disease that is rooted in hell is hard to choke out, but it can be done. All of that is a root that, if you don't feed it with opportunity and the air of your own lungs, will die. Every time.
Now I am coming back to a place that my soul has visited before, but I see it with new eyes as often happens when we get a little older. I'm noticing intricacies in my circumstances that I've never noticed until now, and Truth Himself is giving me clearer vision about the things that surround me here - in this place to which I've come before.
So now I see. I see the new things blossoming in my path. I notice roots that cannot be allowed to grow. I can smell the fragrance of all that I'm meant to become from the heart of the One Who writes my story and holds me in His hand.
Listen my eyes will always dance when they are given an array of dazzling tasks and dreams. That part has pushed me through some very stormy days, so I hope that parts always thrives. But I've added this now - this thing of being here and being now and looking around hard, so I soak in every bit - to live in this moment, because there will never come one like it again, and this one holds for me a purpose.
Gets very noisy, my friends. Not literal noise. It's like noise in your focus not in your ears. So I require some extra things to help me quiet my brain and force the mental connections that can't happen on their own. I have been repairing this part of my life with fervor recently, and something just struck me. The thing that can be the greatest theft in the life and mind of someone with ADHD is the ability to live in...this...moment.
I remember being in high school and my dad getting so frustrated with me that he said "Sarah! You don't have to worry about EVERYTHING!" True but incomplete. I SHOULDN'T worry about everything, but I kind of didn't have a choice. He wasn't frustrated with me. He was frustrated FOR me because he could see that I was completely caught up in finding solutions for problems that didn't even yet exist. I distinctly remember feeling frustrated for the sake of the neighborhood where we lived and mapping out a plan for its revitalization....I was 15. I shake my head now, but my diagnosis at 31 helped give a lot of context.
But I'm here now. I'm not 15 anymore. I'm old enough to be the parent of someone at least that old. I'm not a person sloshing through futility with the mud of my lists and plans and dreams and concerns. I'm learning now, and will until I'm dead, how to let my brain sit and organize all the puzzle pieces so they make a picture instead of a mess. Some of my learning has been in realizing that I am able to engage the beauty and purpose of this moment - just this one.
I am a very typical type A. I'm very driven. I'm a multiple time entrepreneur (1st go around I co owned a web design firm with my dad. Lots of free lance makeup work. Current pursuit is my store). I...do not give up. Stubborn. Iron will. Whatever you want to call it. (My husband is an iron will as well. Iron sharpens iron is never more true than in our home. Oh life...you are a funny thing, yes?)
Sidenote: above are all very prevalent characteristics of people with ADHD. So if your child is failing classes, doesn't focus enough to do well in school and seems to be chaos personified, take a seat and let your heart slow down. She's gonna be just fine, honey. She's gonna rise up and push till she gets what she wants. You just teach her how to figure out what it is that she wants!...also get a psychiatrist to help. Listen there are experts in this field for a reason, and if your brain functions differently than 93% of the reported human population, there is nothing run of the mill about you. You (or your child) are going to need the help of an expert. What you have is rare and precious. Treat it as such.
Now with all this tenacity comes, like I said, a very busy mind. If we learn how to harness it, we do realize that we have this moment, and there is beauty in it.
I used to think of "living in the moment" as having a cast of very selfish hedonism over it. Really sort of lumping together "living IN the moment" and "living FOR the moment". I'm a bit sad now that I did that, but I have discovered that I have more chances, right?
So I'm beginning to live life differently. I'm not just quieting my mind. I am aggressively eliminating noise. If there is something that does not grow my spirit or actually attacks it, I cut it out. I disallow it. Listen some of this is hard. Negative self talk that was supplied to you from a place of disease that is rooted in hell is hard to choke out, but it can be done. All of that is a root that, if you don't feed it with opportunity and the air of your own lungs, will die. Every time.
Now I am coming back to a place that my soul has visited before, but I see it with new eyes as often happens when we get a little older. I'm noticing intricacies in my circumstances that I've never noticed until now, and Truth Himself is giving me clearer vision about the things that surround me here - in this place to which I've come before.
So now I see. I see the new things blossoming in my path. I notice roots that cannot be allowed to grow. I can smell the fragrance of all that I'm meant to become from the heart of the One Who writes my story and holds me in His hand.
Listen my eyes will always dance when they are given an array of dazzling tasks and dreams. That part has pushed me through some very stormy days, so I hope that parts always thrives. But I've added this now - this thing of being here and being now and looking around hard, so I soak in every bit - to live in this moment, because there will never come one like it again, and this one holds for me a purpose.
Tuesday, January 9, 2018
On latent lies and the guilt of not being enough
"And I just stress out about wanting to make everything perfect for everyone, but I just <insert your go to dysfinctional reaction here> and that's so dumb because 'perfect' doesn't exist..." I said to my friend on the phone the other day as I packed up all our Christmas presents at my sister's house a few days ago.
"I know you guys probably think I don't ever clean but I really do all the time..." to my kids who almost interrupted me with their shocked response of "Mommy! We don't think that at all!" I heard variations of the response in stereo because more than one child spoke out with each word drowned with incredulity.
Listen I wasn't fishing for compliments in either of the above scenarios, and those are 2 examples from a bank of probably thousands.
Feeling actual guilt. If I cannot facilitate perfection and enrichment to the richest depth of their respective definitions, I don't feel disappointment or annoyance. I feel full on guilt. I feel physical cramping in my stomach and a knot of grief wringing its way into a secure twist each time I try to swallow. I want to articulate this as well as I can because I know this for sure. I am not the only one that holds this standard for myself (but strangely not for any other living, breathing, sentient being on the planet). I am not alone in doing this. I want to get to the bottom of it, so we can take these broken pieces and reconstruct them into something with better integrity than what existed before.
A couple of months ago, I was encouraged to dispense with the personally ubiquitous notion of "should" in relation to how I spend out my minutes on this big round ball. The idea seemed so trite when I was first presented with it that it has taken me months to actually sort out what that means. Tonight it hit me like a ton of bricks.
There is a fine line between self indulgence and self care. There is also a fine line between self depracation or negative self talk and healthy, beautiful humility. Want to know what separates them? The gaze of the subject. We self reflect and even use mirrors in the physical world to maintain and grow, but balance is needed here. We would show signs of real disorder if we spent disproportionate amounts of time just staring at ourselves. It would be equally unhealthy if we never gave regard to what is going on with our outsides. Not caring and letting things go is evidence of a loss of something important. I want to create these parameters so it's abundantly clear what I'm trying to convey.
Guilt is a weird thing. Healthy guilt over something you willfully destroyed can lead to recovery. False guilt almost always does nothing but damage. Survivor guilt. Guilt from what is left of lies we have been told about what is our responsibility *hint - you're never guilty of something someone else does. Not even God thinks that.
False guilt makes you do weird things - at least it makes me do weird things the primary of which is that I have a hard time enjoying anything. Sometimes that means sabotaging something an old lie tells me I don't deserve. I also tend to stay wound pretty tight. I just stay tense - constantly worried that something is going to crash to the ground into a million irreparable pieces because my hands failed at keeping safe the thing that is important to me or someone else.
Cinderella syndrome of not being allowed to do anything until ALL your work is done. It is healthy to teach kids the discipline of keeping order. That is vital. Mine just got perverted and not by my parents. The truth is, we absolutely need to cover bases of order, but attending to your tasks does not make you MORE deserving of good things in life, and having things left on your to do list does not make you less deserving nor does it rob from your loved ones.
Here's a window into my life: 5 years ago I left my marriage for reasons that are my own business. Suffice it to say, I felt it was absolutely necessary to leave and had been battling against leaving for upwards to a year. There were three reasons I battled so long and wrestled so hard, and they each came with my chin and a middle name I picked. I would tell myself all the time "I can deal with this. This isn't so bad. Being unhappy is not the worst thing. I don't want my kids to have a broken family." I STILL don't want them to have a broken family, but the day came when I knew that I had spent my very last night in a shared house with the five of us.
Listen I have healed in so many ways and grown past so many things, but memories of that day and the months afterwards while I watched the unraveling of an entire life's worth of dreams and a decade of time will ALWAYS cause a stinging sensation in my stomach and a choke in my throat. But despite that pain, I will always carry with me the knowing that leaving was the thing that had to be done.
I was right, though - about the broken family. It broke my kids' family, and until really the last few days, I have carried with me this singing guilt over that.
After I "struck out on my own", my standard of living became much lower than any I'd ever experienced before. I mean, I lived in a homeless shelter for 10 weeks and then scrambled to find a small apartment because the shelter was going to kick me out for being there too long. (Sidenote: please try to completely build a life in 10 weeks with almost no financial help or local friends - it's impossible. Spare a little grace next time you see a homeless person) No longer did I have a way to do a single thing for my kids that I had spent their entire lives doing. No longer did they get to have the version of a mommy and daddy that they deserved. And I just felt terrible...for years. Every time they came home to me, my heart grieved for the time we'd spent apart. Every time I scraped together a little money to feed them (meaning I didn't eat - goodbye 45 pounds), I grieved over not being able to give them something really delicious. We didn't get to see my family for over a year and 3 years respective to certain members. They had one pair of shoes at my house for a while, and weekends were spent doing sometimes boring things sometimes in the heat because they were free, and sometimes it meant just staying home because I couldn't spare the gas to drive to a park because I needed it to be able to drive to work. And then there's the time. I have missed out on so much time with them - time that there is no earthly way to recompense. I will never know what it was like to watch my now almost 6 year old spread out her arms to balance herself while she took her first steps. I'll never be able to infuse into the memory banks of my older two kids dinner conversations and homework sessions and birthday parties and Christmas mornings that we spent apart. Honestly, I'll never be able to give them "normal", and it has just killed me.
So i have tried to do what I could which is just basically being their mom and being a safe place for them to get hugs and finish homework and cry sometimes and play board games and make memories. And I've still never been able to really give them anything fancy - I have just always wanted it all to be whatever version of "perfect" I could offer them - and perfect is a farce so I have spent many days after they leave home here to go home to their dad just sitting in shocked regret at how I had, once again....failed.
Again with the failure. What is that? Every time I would express this regret to those with whom my heart is safe, they seemed confused - like the standard I had set was some obnoxiously rare unicorn. I still didn't absorb why they were confused. I just plopped down in the delapidated sitting room in my head and listened to the record play - the record of lies. "You're not a good mom"..."a REAL mom can..."..."Shouldn't you have (or be) xyz by now?"..."the kids don't even like it when you..."..."Did you only give them xyz?...They deserve better...They deserve more" for years.
Part of getting older is learning, and part of that learning is understanding you must continue to always learn. Something I learned today was something someone said to me when I recounted some of my feelings. Guilt and shame are strange things, remember?
Guilt and shame do not belong to me. There are some parts of my story that resulted in the way that they did because of choices someone else made. As far as the parts that were the result of decisions I made, there are still things that cannot be changed by anything ever, and there is a God who writes my story who has cast away guilt of any wrong or selfish choices I made and forbids shame from touching my life at all. If I accept guilt for something for which I have already brought and confessed before the feet of a loving God or if I accept shame for something that was He chose to put to His own account, I am committing a thievery because He is the only One who had enough of what it was going to take to pay for all that. See, Jesus didn't just pay for our sins by His sacrifice on the cross so he could give us all good things (in fact ONLY having good things isn't promised anywhere in the Bible so...people should stop telling other people that and people should stop saying that bad things happen to people because they weren't enough of something or too much of another...anyway). Him hanging on the cross and paying the price for ALL GUILT AND SHAME means that He OWNS THEM! He holds dominion and ownership of them, and anyone who has been willing to give their guilt and shame to Him to pay for those things must keep their hands off. It's wrong to take something that doesn't belong to you, isn't it?
So there goes my guilt and shame. I sold it, and I got a gift of beauty and forever hope in exchange. And I am NEVER going to be a perfect mother...or wife or friend or daughter or sister or anything, but perfect is a farce and love isn't and love covers a multitude of sins (or shortcomings or what have you).
So when my kids come home to me next, I'm going to remind myself that they don't even want perfect. They just want me. They're not looking for any compensatory experience or feeling to cushion the blow of what they've lost. They're every bit as thankful for every single thing we have right now. Just as it is. For them, that is perfection.
Here's a window into my life: 5 years ago I left my marriage for reasons that are my own business. Suffice it to say, I felt it was absolutely necessary to leave and had been battling against leaving for upwards to a year. There were three reasons I battled so long and wrestled so hard, and they each came with my chin and a middle name I picked. I would tell myself all the time "I can deal with this. This isn't so bad. Being unhappy is not the worst thing. I don't want my kids to have a broken family." I STILL don't want them to have a broken family, but the day came when I knew that I had spent my very last night in a shared house with the five of us.
Listen I have healed in so many ways and grown past so many things, but memories of that day and the months afterwards while I watched the unraveling of an entire life's worth of dreams and a decade of time will ALWAYS cause a stinging sensation in my stomach and a choke in my throat. But despite that pain, I will always carry with me the knowing that leaving was the thing that had to be done.
I was right, though - about the broken family. It broke my kids' family, and until really the last few days, I have carried with me this singing guilt over that.
After I "struck out on my own", my standard of living became much lower than any I'd ever experienced before. I mean, I lived in a homeless shelter for 10 weeks and then scrambled to find a small apartment because the shelter was going to kick me out for being there too long. (Sidenote: please try to completely build a life in 10 weeks with almost no financial help or local friends - it's impossible. Spare a little grace next time you see a homeless person) No longer did I have a way to do a single thing for my kids that I had spent their entire lives doing. No longer did they get to have the version of a mommy and daddy that they deserved. And I just felt terrible...for years. Every time they came home to me, my heart grieved for the time we'd spent apart. Every time I scraped together a little money to feed them (meaning I didn't eat - goodbye 45 pounds), I grieved over not being able to give them something really delicious. We didn't get to see my family for over a year and 3 years respective to certain members. They had one pair of shoes at my house for a while, and weekends were spent doing sometimes boring things sometimes in the heat because they were free, and sometimes it meant just staying home because I couldn't spare the gas to drive to a park because I needed it to be able to drive to work. And then there's the time. I have missed out on so much time with them - time that there is no earthly way to recompense. I will never know what it was like to watch my now almost 6 year old spread out her arms to balance herself while she took her first steps. I'll never be able to infuse into the memory banks of my older two kids dinner conversations and homework sessions and birthday parties and Christmas mornings that we spent apart. Honestly, I'll never be able to give them "normal", and it has just killed me.
So i have tried to do what I could which is just basically being their mom and being a safe place for them to get hugs and finish homework and cry sometimes and play board games and make memories. And I've still never been able to really give them anything fancy - I have just always wanted it all to be whatever version of "perfect" I could offer them - and perfect is a farce so I have spent many days after they leave home here to go home to their dad just sitting in shocked regret at how I had, once again....failed.
Again with the failure. What is that? Every time I would express this regret to those with whom my heart is safe, they seemed confused - like the standard I had set was some obnoxiously rare unicorn. I still didn't absorb why they were confused. I just plopped down in the delapidated sitting room in my head and listened to the record play - the record of lies. "You're not a good mom"..."a REAL mom can..."..."Shouldn't you have (or be) xyz by now?"..."the kids don't even like it when you..."..."Did you only give them xyz?...They deserve better...They deserve more" for years.
Part of getting older is learning, and part of that learning is understanding you must continue to always learn. Something I learned today was something someone said to me when I recounted some of my feelings. Guilt and shame are strange things, remember?
Guilt and shame do not belong to me. There are some parts of my story that resulted in the way that they did because of choices someone else made. As far as the parts that were the result of decisions I made, there are still things that cannot be changed by anything ever, and there is a God who writes my story who has cast away guilt of any wrong or selfish choices I made and forbids shame from touching my life at all. If I accept guilt for something for which I have already brought and confessed before the feet of a loving God or if I accept shame for something that was He chose to put to His own account, I am committing a thievery because He is the only One who had enough of what it was going to take to pay for all that. See, Jesus didn't just pay for our sins by His sacrifice on the cross so he could give us all good things (in fact ONLY having good things isn't promised anywhere in the Bible so...people should stop telling other people that and people should stop saying that bad things happen to people because they weren't enough of something or too much of another...anyway). Him hanging on the cross and paying the price for ALL GUILT AND SHAME means that He OWNS THEM! He holds dominion and ownership of them, and anyone who has been willing to give their guilt and shame to Him to pay for those things must keep their hands off. It's wrong to take something that doesn't belong to you, isn't it?
So there goes my guilt and shame. I sold it, and I got a gift of beauty and forever hope in exchange. And I am NEVER going to be a perfect mother...or wife or friend or daughter or sister or anything, but perfect is a farce and love isn't and love covers a multitude of sins (or shortcomings or what have you).
So when my kids come home to me next, I'm going to remind myself that they don't even want perfect. They just want me. They're not looking for any compensatory experience or feeling to cushion the blow of what they've lost. They're every bit as thankful for every single thing we have right now. Just as it is. For them, that is perfection.
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