Seventy times seven. That is how many times we are to forgive someone. I have always thought that meant 490 different offenses of different kinds or even 490 incidences of the same offense, but today I see it very differently.
He wasn't commanding us to keep a tally. This wasn't for the sake of myriad different things or innumerable occurrences of it. It was for one offense. Forgive them for that one incident of the one offense 490+ times? Why would there ever be a necessity for something like that? But the longer I spend on this big green ball (the part where I stand is green - I don't live in the blue), the more I learn that forgiving isn't an event.
It is a practice. It is a process. That is why a person would need to offer forgiveness almost 500 times for one thing happening once.
But rarely, when people are close, does there ever only be one offense one time. And we know with you and I that there was so much more than that. There was so much more.
Really, it's pretty true that no one will really know what it was like when it was just me and you together. No amount of effort in description will ever be the same as actually having been there. That's just something that me and you and God know, but we do know. We know so well, and I don't think we will ever forget it.
There are some things I can know because I have lived it. No ones interpretation or evaluation or opinion can ever change what I know I lived with me and you - the relationship that was just us. There is nothing that can change it from being true forever, and there is nothing that can change that it happened. Because that is just how truth goes.
I have grappled with the things I know - the things I lived that I know are true and real. I need you to know that God has healed me so much. God has helped me sort out so much of it, and He doesn't look like He has any interest in cutting that healing short any time soon.
God and I have walked back down almost every single step of the road of the journey that you and I shared during the time we told everyone we were friends. We have walked through the valley of the shadow of death. He has held my hand as I choked on my own tears remembering how bad I hurt down to the depths of every part of who I am.
He is still helping me figure out just where to put each little moment, and I need you to know that He is making it into something beautiful. I need you to know that you didn't ruin anything. There were moments that sure looked like ruining me was something you wanted very much. You made every exhibition that would lead anyone to believe that that is what you wanted. I need you to know that God kept that from happening, and He is slowly but surely taking every moment of hurt that you intentionally caused, and He is making it into something so wonderful that now, I just keep pinching myself that this is the life I get to have.
There are some things I don't know, and honestly, that has always been the hardest part. Why? Why did you do all these things to me? What did I ever do to make you want to hurt me so deeply and to make an effort to make the mark as permanently as you could? Why did you choose to do all of this when we told everyone that we were the kind of friends that were best. You were my favorite friend in the whole world, and you told everyone I was yours. Why would you want to hurt me and to do it continually?
It has been very confusing to live this. It has been very confusing and very painful to live this and to have these questions, but I need you to know that today, God gave me my answer to all of them - the question impregnating every moment of these hurts.
The answer is this: it doesn't matter. Will you read that again? It doesn't matter to me anymore. Today, I fully forgive you. And this has been a process because this is most assuredly not the first time that my heart took the broken pieces of you and me to God and asked Him to sort it all out and to just hand all of this to Him. I need you to know that too, okay? I need you to know that I have already forgiven you 490 times for each singular incident. My heart has already offered this to you, and God has just done miraculous things in my heart to help me go deeper and deeper into my soul to some of those moments that hurt the most or the ones that are the freshest.
I need you to know that you have been having forgiveness for a long time, and my prayer is that this fact offers you some kind of relief. I don't know all the why's, but I know that people don't do those things unless they're hurting really badly. We do things when we're hurting, and God told me that I am to forgive you. And I have.
But today it goes a little deeper and will last a little longer. Today, this forgiveness is more permanent that all the others before today.
This one sets us free. This is the one where I totally stop trying to find answers to questions I can't ask you. This is the one where I lay all that pain to final rest and I go to the God of heaven and again ask that He bless your life and show you Himself in a way that will heal you too. Because I want that for you. I have always wanted that for you. So many tears and so many nights of remembering what it was like to be close just wishing you could get a glimpse of what the world looks like outside of all the hurt. I want that for you.
Some day, you will cross my mind, and I will realize you haven't come and gone in a very long time. That day looks like its soon, honestly. The space between when we were friends and the page of this calendar is a pretty wide expanse, and, like I said, God has helped me do all this healing and has given me a life without you in it.
That's why I'm writing you this letter. I don't know where in the world you are exactly at this moment. I don't know that you will ever even see this, but in the off chance you do, this is just something that I wanted you to know and this was the only way I could offer it to you.
Thank you. Thank you for all the happy moments we shared during our friendship. Thank you for all the good things. I WILL always hold those in my arms really tight. But I need you to know - about all the bad...I forgive you, okay?
I do.
May this letter find you well. May you be living prosperity and abundance and a happiness that is the envy of all who know you. May you see God in a way that makes heaven feel closer than earth could ever feel, and may you live long days surrounded by the ones you love.
And may you always know this:
I forgive you...seventy times seven
Sunday, September 22, 2019
Sunday, June 16, 2019
On being fatherless
He kissed my hand a million times and called me princess just as many. He celebrated even the most minor accomplishments of mine. He loved me with an abandon that his father had never shown him.
And he's gone.
It has been 12 years and some months since the horrific day of finding out that my dad had dropped dead of a massive heart attack on the same day when were going to have my birthday dinner at his house with all of us kids and our babies.
For 12 years, on Father's Day, my heart has ached, and it has been so confusing for me. I haven't known how to even sort it out - until today.
My dad was a really great dad. He was human, and he and I have parented differently, but he was an amazing dad. I have felt so conflicted about expressing sadness on Father's Day because I had a good dad. There are many that feel sadness on Father's Day because their dad was never there or because he is still alive but is too toxic to have a relationship with. Then there are those that I know have terrible fathers that, most perplexing to me, find the need to heap accolades upon their dad's name that i know is not the actual identity of the man whose blood runs through their veins.
I didn't have that, so I haven't known or felt comfortable with how to talk about why Father's Day is so hard beyond just saying that I miss him. It's always been more than that, but I haven't been able to let myself dare say publicly what my dad did to me. He did something that I haven't spoken about negatively because I didn't want to stain his name or all the ways that he was amazing, but it's time. I'm ready.
He died. And he left us. He left us all so permanently that there is no finding him again as long as we breath air from this world. There is no tracking him down and seeing if things can be mended or if there is hope that we could once again hear his voice and booming laugh or feel his huge hug.
He left, and he's gone, and as soon as most of the cars had pulled away from the graveside to put him in the hole on the hill where I collapsed in tears, my world broke in a way that there has never been a way to put it back together.
Not so far anyway. Because I tried to hide how bad it hurt that he left. And what exactly about it has hurt so bad? What were the things that actually broke?
This morning, I felt it flood every nook and cranny of my consciousness, and it happened when our pastor was talking about father's praying blessings over their children. It just hit me - I will never have that. Because my dad is dead. All those things that a dad is supposed to do, my dad is not going to do. He will never be there for anything, and he stopped being here for anything 12 years and some months ago and it has left a big, wide, gaping hole that, though my step dad is so loving, no human can fill
The hole is there, and my dad put it there because he left. Did he choose it? No. That doesn't matter. What matters is that the hole is there and he is not and that's not natural and it isn't right, and there's no going back on it. Ever again.
So what is my hole, exactly?
Well,
My dad could fix anything, and he did. He was a mechanic, so he fixed all of our cars. He worked on plumbing in our houses sometimes. He worked to built or repair small projects. If it was in the confines of anything technology based, there was nothing you could break that he couldn't fix. He spent many, many hours helping people over the phone to recover lost data or salvage a machine they couldn't afford to replace. He went over to people's houses and never grumbled, that I could hear, about how many times they needed his help. He fixed relationships. He found a way to have a relationship with and show love to his dad who had beaten him so savagely on so many occasions. About a week before my grandfather died, my dad knew his time was getting close so he called his dad. He wanted to speak words of comfort and love, and when his dad just became nasty with him, my dad returned it with love and kindness. He preached his own dad's funeral, and there were no words of malice. There also weren't words of praise - that would have been disingenuous. Instead, he just preached a message of the gospel of the God who had gladly stepped in to be the Daddy my dad so desperately needed. On the day my grandfather died, my dad cried like a little boy, and I just couldn't understand it. Now I do. Now I understand what had happened to my dad.
My dad was also my protector. He wanted me to be treated with respect and love, and he would not tolerate anyone attacking any of the 5 of us. After his own childhood, he took our advocacy very seriously. He marched his way in front of plenty of people who thought they'd flex and abuse a muscle of power at us and put them in their place. He did this for me numerous times. I now can piece together that my dad heavily suspected that I had been raped by a summer romance turned nightmare. He knew he had to wait for me to tell him, but that didn't stop from calling my attacker - a pathetic, puny, gangly punk, into his office and saying, "The state of Tennessee isn't big enough for the both of us, and I'm not leaving. I better not ever see your face on this earth ever again, and if you ever see me, I'm gonna need for you to walk across to the other side of the road so I dont have to look at you. Do you understand me? Now get out of here." All still sitting in the chair behind his giant desk covered in projects and paperwork for the business he had worked so tirelessly to build. There were other threats that I had unknowingly walked into. My dad made a concerted effort to maintain a presence where he felt there was a threat to me. Always offering help and love to one who was going for my throat but also letting that person know that, if they wanted to try to come for me, they were going to have to go through him first. That's just not something people did. My dad was a lover who everyone knew for being loving and a funny jokester, but there was a line, and if you were close, he wouldnt let there be any mistake about where the line was. When my dad died, my throat was the first place this person went. They knew I had no one to protect me and that I really didn't know how to protect myself at all. They knew I was an easy target, and they capitalized on that. Their viciousness almost did me in, but they had forgotten one thing: in all of the being protected, I also learned how to protect. It took a while, but I took what I learned and have built a shield that cannot be penetrated. It has all hurt so badly, though.
Why?
My dad was also my best friend. I was born when he was 23, and we were both cut from the same cloth down to the nose on our faces. As I got older, my dad began to treat me like a peer in the business we shared. Sometimes he would call me to ask me what my thoughts were on a matter, and I knew it was because he actually respected my opinion. We just understood each other. It felt so amazing to have someone in my life who just always seemed to understand me without me always needing to explain.
The thing that has left the biggest hole is that I miss so much mattering to him as much as I did. I know I matter like that to my mom, and I still have her. It's not that he was the only one - it's that I had that from him and it was so significant and then there was just this abrupt ripping away of a love I knew was so deep that it's almost all he thought about. We have unearthed some scribbled down thoughts of my dad's from when my older brother and I were still small and my younger brother and sister weren't yet born, and being a good dad and making us feel love was something he pursued obsessively. Being a good husband and dad was all that mattered to him. Us. Me. All that mattered, and now it is gone for the rest of the days I walk this big green ball.
And you know, it doesn't matter that I was a grown up when my dad died and that I'm now 37 years old. Because, just like my dad was a 39 year old little boy sobbing at being made orphaned of a father, I am too. I have been orphaned of a father - my father. And I haven't wanted to admit that because I felt like it implied abandonment, and I knew that wasn't the pain I had to tell. Mine was different, but it's time that I stop pretending that it isn't there.
It's time.
I don't have a biological dad here anymore, and I won't. And it hurts today, but here is the beauty I was reminded of this morning from caring words spoken over us. I couldn't be adopted until I admitted that I was orphaned of a father. Whilst I am eternally God's kid, He has been waiting to fill that gaping hole that was left by my dad dying and leaving me. I have held that part in closed fists thinking that my childish wisdom of gripping it tight was going to make it different than what it was. Now, I can finally see that I have failed, but I never needed to have succeeded, because my Abba has been waiting for me to give Him this part. So I do that today.
I know it will be a process, and I don't even know how it will go, but how is it that a Daddy loves? He spends time. He protects. He defends. He is a constant best friend. He loves obsessively. Those are the things that made Danny Baker great, right? Those are the things that made him my hero, and the opportunity was afforded to him by my being nearby.
So I don't really know what this is going to look like, but I'm willing now to really give God the chance I'd been refusing Him. In the past year or two, He has really taught me about how to be nearby to Him. He knew this day was going to come and that it wouldn't all register until I had spent the time learning to be nearby. Now will come the next part of being nearby and actually opening my heart to be loved. Oh, it's really going to hurt. Opening your heart hurts, but I know that He will have a way to make me into someone far beyond anyone I ever imagined that I could be and to show the magnitude of who He is beyond what I have ever known.
Now I will let Him show me. Now I will not refuse to say that I'm half orphaned. Now I get it. Now I will let Him show me the great and wondrous things that He has planned.
Happy Father's Day, Dad. I love you forever.
Love,
Sasha
And he's gone.
It has been 12 years and some months since the horrific day of finding out that my dad had dropped dead of a massive heart attack on the same day when were going to have my birthday dinner at his house with all of us kids and our babies.
For 12 years, on Father's Day, my heart has ached, and it has been so confusing for me. I haven't known how to even sort it out - until today.
My dad was a really great dad. He was human, and he and I have parented differently, but he was an amazing dad. I have felt so conflicted about expressing sadness on Father's Day because I had a good dad. There are many that feel sadness on Father's Day because their dad was never there or because he is still alive but is too toxic to have a relationship with. Then there are those that I know have terrible fathers that, most perplexing to me, find the need to heap accolades upon their dad's name that i know is not the actual identity of the man whose blood runs through their veins.
I didn't have that, so I haven't known or felt comfortable with how to talk about why Father's Day is so hard beyond just saying that I miss him. It's always been more than that, but I haven't been able to let myself dare say publicly what my dad did to me. He did something that I haven't spoken about negatively because I didn't want to stain his name or all the ways that he was amazing, but it's time. I'm ready.
He died. And he left us. He left us all so permanently that there is no finding him again as long as we breath air from this world. There is no tracking him down and seeing if things can be mended or if there is hope that we could once again hear his voice and booming laugh or feel his huge hug.
He left, and he's gone, and as soon as most of the cars had pulled away from the graveside to put him in the hole on the hill where I collapsed in tears, my world broke in a way that there has never been a way to put it back together.
Not so far anyway. Because I tried to hide how bad it hurt that he left. And what exactly about it has hurt so bad? What were the things that actually broke?
This morning, I felt it flood every nook and cranny of my consciousness, and it happened when our pastor was talking about father's praying blessings over their children. It just hit me - I will never have that. Because my dad is dead. All those things that a dad is supposed to do, my dad is not going to do. He will never be there for anything, and he stopped being here for anything 12 years and some months ago and it has left a big, wide, gaping hole that, though my step dad is so loving, no human can fill
The hole is there, and my dad put it there because he left. Did he choose it? No. That doesn't matter. What matters is that the hole is there and he is not and that's not natural and it isn't right, and there's no going back on it. Ever again.
So what is my hole, exactly?
Well,
My dad could fix anything, and he did. He was a mechanic, so he fixed all of our cars. He worked on plumbing in our houses sometimes. He worked to built or repair small projects. If it was in the confines of anything technology based, there was nothing you could break that he couldn't fix. He spent many, many hours helping people over the phone to recover lost data or salvage a machine they couldn't afford to replace. He went over to people's houses and never grumbled, that I could hear, about how many times they needed his help. He fixed relationships. He found a way to have a relationship with and show love to his dad who had beaten him so savagely on so many occasions. About a week before my grandfather died, my dad knew his time was getting close so he called his dad. He wanted to speak words of comfort and love, and when his dad just became nasty with him, my dad returned it with love and kindness. He preached his own dad's funeral, and there were no words of malice. There also weren't words of praise - that would have been disingenuous. Instead, he just preached a message of the gospel of the God who had gladly stepped in to be the Daddy my dad so desperately needed. On the day my grandfather died, my dad cried like a little boy, and I just couldn't understand it. Now I do. Now I understand what had happened to my dad.
My dad was also my protector. He wanted me to be treated with respect and love, and he would not tolerate anyone attacking any of the 5 of us. After his own childhood, he took our advocacy very seriously. He marched his way in front of plenty of people who thought they'd flex and abuse a muscle of power at us and put them in their place. He did this for me numerous times. I now can piece together that my dad heavily suspected that I had been raped by a summer romance turned nightmare. He knew he had to wait for me to tell him, but that didn't stop from calling my attacker - a pathetic, puny, gangly punk, into his office and saying, "The state of Tennessee isn't big enough for the both of us, and I'm not leaving. I better not ever see your face on this earth ever again, and if you ever see me, I'm gonna need for you to walk across to the other side of the road so I dont have to look at you. Do you understand me? Now get out of here." All still sitting in the chair behind his giant desk covered in projects and paperwork for the business he had worked so tirelessly to build. There were other threats that I had unknowingly walked into. My dad made a concerted effort to maintain a presence where he felt there was a threat to me. Always offering help and love to one who was going for my throat but also letting that person know that, if they wanted to try to come for me, they were going to have to go through him first. That's just not something people did. My dad was a lover who everyone knew for being loving and a funny jokester, but there was a line, and if you were close, he wouldnt let there be any mistake about where the line was. When my dad died, my throat was the first place this person went. They knew I had no one to protect me and that I really didn't know how to protect myself at all. They knew I was an easy target, and they capitalized on that. Their viciousness almost did me in, but they had forgotten one thing: in all of the being protected, I also learned how to protect. It took a while, but I took what I learned and have built a shield that cannot be penetrated. It has all hurt so badly, though.
Why?
My dad was also my best friend. I was born when he was 23, and we were both cut from the same cloth down to the nose on our faces. As I got older, my dad began to treat me like a peer in the business we shared. Sometimes he would call me to ask me what my thoughts were on a matter, and I knew it was because he actually respected my opinion. We just understood each other. It felt so amazing to have someone in my life who just always seemed to understand me without me always needing to explain.
The thing that has left the biggest hole is that I miss so much mattering to him as much as I did. I know I matter like that to my mom, and I still have her. It's not that he was the only one - it's that I had that from him and it was so significant and then there was just this abrupt ripping away of a love I knew was so deep that it's almost all he thought about. We have unearthed some scribbled down thoughts of my dad's from when my older brother and I were still small and my younger brother and sister weren't yet born, and being a good dad and making us feel love was something he pursued obsessively. Being a good husband and dad was all that mattered to him. Us. Me. All that mattered, and now it is gone for the rest of the days I walk this big green ball.
And you know, it doesn't matter that I was a grown up when my dad died and that I'm now 37 years old. Because, just like my dad was a 39 year old little boy sobbing at being made orphaned of a father, I am too. I have been orphaned of a father - my father. And I haven't wanted to admit that because I felt like it implied abandonment, and I knew that wasn't the pain I had to tell. Mine was different, but it's time that I stop pretending that it isn't there.
It's time.
I don't have a biological dad here anymore, and I won't. And it hurts today, but here is the beauty I was reminded of this morning from caring words spoken over us. I couldn't be adopted until I admitted that I was orphaned of a father. Whilst I am eternally God's kid, He has been waiting to fill that gaping hole that was left by my dad dying and leaving me. I have held that part in closed fists thinking that my childish wisdom of gripping it tight was going to make it different than what it was. Now, I can finally see that I have failed, but I never needed to have succeeded, because my Abba has been waiting for me to give Him this part. So I do that today.
I know it will be a process, and I don't even know how it will go, but how is it that a Daddy loves? He spends time. He protects. He defends. He is a constant best friend. He loves obsessively. Those are the things that made Danny Baker great, right? Those are the things that made him my hero, and the opportunity was afforded to him by my being nearby.
So I don't really know what this is going to look like, but I'm willing now to really give God the chance I'd been refusing Him. In the past year or two, He has really taught me about how to be nearby to Him. He knew this day was going to come and that it wouldn't all register until I had spent the time learning to be nearby. Now will come the next part of being nearby and actually opening my heart to be loved. Oh, it's really going to hurt. Opening your heart hurts, but I know that He will have a way to make me into someone far beyond anyone I ever imagined that I could be and to show the magnitude of who He is beyond what I have ever known.
Now I will let Him show me. Now I will not refuse to say that I'm half orphaned. Now I get it. Now I will let Him show me the great and wondrous things that He has planned.
Happy Father's Day, Dad. I love you forever.
Love,
Sasha
Tuesday, February 19, 2019
On laying each of them to rest
The human soul is a multiplicitous thing. We are not but one dimension of ourselves but rather, we are a jewel faceted with the sides of all of our life experiences. We live through things that make us grow, and that version of us forges on. It grows. It becomes. It changes.
And then there is the thing of tragedy and injury. It is without fail that tragedy or hurt falls upon every single life - to varying degrees. And by varying degrees, I mean that it could be an extremity of circumstances or the level and depth of pain felt by an individual.
It always happens. To everyone.
I will not pretend that there are not those who have lives that have an enviable amount of predictability that allows them to bounce back a little easier. There are those who manage to almost float through the whole measure of their breaths with a way that seems to be avoidant of anything catastrophic. There are those lives. Mine is not one of them. Yours may not be either. Let's ignite the fragrance that is this path of pain and trial.
Sometimes, just as in the physical realm, there are things that just sliced through a little too deep or that slammed into our spiritual bones a little (or a lot) too hard. When this happens, the version of us that traveled our story up to that point gets stunted. It gets halted right there to a state of terminal. The thing, whatever it was, injured us so severely that theversion of us that lived up to that moment cannot continue any longer.
The curious thing is that the part of us that continues on, does just that. There are cases where the burden is too crushing and the psychological effects completely prevent the soul and the body and the mind from going any further. Let us elaborate on those who are, by God's grace, able to continue.
The injured version of us - it is unwell to the point of a spiritual vegetative state. No brain function. The heart is broken. We have to lay it to rest. We have to actually, consciously allow it to breathe its last and collapse into the arms of everything that is to come and rest in ever peace.
If we do not, we, effectively, bend down and raise this sickly version and carry it across our backs. We take it with us. We call it baggage. We call it scars. We call it "old ghosts". And we lumber on encumbered with the dead weight of a story that isn't well. If we accumulate a number of these and do this thing of the throwing over the shoulder, the weight just gets heavier - the life more burdened.
Sometimes these old ghosts of us are smaller - sneaky almost. They hide in the crevices of things we didn't realize were important to our hearts, and then they jump out with vicious surprise. Sometimes these can be sort of superficial, so the laying them to rest is not hard - even if you have to do it a number of times.
Sometimes they are those jagged, vibrant threads woven straight through the center. They are who we are. We are the sum...of them. They run deep and all the way across. These are the ones that are the hardest. These are the ones that hurt. These are the ones that deserve our homage and then our memorial of them - for they are the heaviest. So so heavy.
It is no secret that I have these old versions of me that draped across my shoulders for a long, long time. It is no secret that I have held service for a few. They have been laid to rest. I do not forget about them. I remember - always. But they do not burden me anymore. I have stood toe to toe with the enemy himself and exiled from my spirit the servant of his that caused me pain.
There are just so many.
A lot of work to do.
Tonight I visited the memory of two different times that my spirit was made to be damaged. I chose to take the me of now and tell her - the me of then, that I am bigger and stronger now and I will not let that person hurt her any more - that I am now there to stand in the way and that the me of now is strong enough to send the attacker away knowing that I am impenetrable. To try to attack is futility at its finest. The she of then will never have to be afraid again. I will protect her now - forever.
So tonight there is a pierce in my chest and tears that burn my eyes as I grieve the me that hurt so bad - that she ever had to hurt like that and be so afraid. But I smile at how proud I am of her that she managed to get us that far. It's just that it's my turn now. It's my turn to travel this life - to finish the story. To find the other versions of me that are crippled at different points in my history.
I'll find them all. With God's help, I'll find them all. With Him, all things are possible. With His shield I am invincible.
And then there is the thing of tragedy and injury. It is without fail that tragedy or hurt falls upon every single life - to varying degrees. And by varying degrees, I mean that it could be an extremity of circumstances or the level and depth of pain felt by an individual.
It always happens. To everyone.
I will not pretend that there are not those who have lives that have an enviable amount of predictability that allows them to bounce back a little easier. There are those who manage to almost float through the whole measure of their breaths with a way that seems to be avoidant of anything catastrophic. There are those lives. Mine is not one of them. Yours may not be either. Let's ignite the fragrance that is this path of pain and trial.
Sometimes, just as in the physical realm, there are things that just sliced through a little too deep or that slammed into our spiritual bones a little (or a lot) too hard. When this happens, the version of us that traveled our story up to that point gets stunted. It gets halted right there to a state of terminal. The thing, whatever it was, injured us so severely that theversion of us that lived up to that moment cannot continue any longer.
The curious thing is that the part of us that continues on, does just that. There are cases where the burden is too crushing and the psychological effects completely prevent the soul and the body and the mind from going any further. Let us elaborate on those who are, by God's grace, able to continue.
The injured version of us - it is unwell to the point of a spiritual vegetative state. No brain function. The heart is broken. We have to lay it to rest. We have to actually, consciously allow it to breathe its last and collapse into the arms of everything that is to come and rest in ever peace.
If we do not, we, effectively, bend down and raise this sickly version and carry it across our backs. We take it with us. We call it baggage. We call it scars. We call it "old ghosts". And we lumber on encumbered with the dead weight of a story that isn't well. If we accumulate a number of these and do this thing of the throwing over the shoulder, the weight just gets heavier - the life more burdened.
Sometimes these old ghosts of us are smaller - sneaky almost. They hide in the crevices of things we didn't realize were important to our hearts, and then they jump out with vicious surprise. Sometimes these can be sort of superficial, so the laying them to rest is not hard - even if you have to do it a number of times.
Sometimes they are those jagged, vibrant threads woven straight through the center. They are who we are. We are the sum...of them. They run deep and all the way across. These are the ones that are the hardest. These are the ones that hurt. These are the ones that deserve our homage and then our memorial of them - for they are the heaviest. So so heavy.
It is no secret that I have these old versions of me that draped across my shoulders for a long, long time. It is no secret that I have held service for a few. They have been laid to rest. I do not forget about them. I remember - always. But they do not burden me anymore. I have stood toe to toe with the enemy himself and exiled from my spirit the servant of his that caused me pain.
There are just so many.
A lot of work to do.
Tonight I visited the memory of two different times that my spirit was made to be damaged. I chose to take the me of now and tell her - the me of then, that I am bigger and stronger now and I will not let that person hurt her any more - that I am now there to stand in the way and that the me of now is strong enough to send the attacker away knowing that I am impenetrable. To try to attack is futility at its finest. The she of then will never have to be afraid again. I will protect her now - forever.
So tonight there is a pierce in my chest and tears that burn my eyes as I grieve the me that hurt so bad - that she ever had to hurt like that and be so afraid. But I smile at how proud I am of her that she managed to get us that far. It's just that it's my turn now. It's my turn to travel this life - to finish the story. To find the other versions of me that are crippled at different points in my history.
I'll find them all. With God's help, I'll find them all. With Him, all things are possible. With His shield I am invincible.
Friday, October 26, 2018
On naming my first attacker
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
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
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.
Tuesday, November 7, 2017
On there being a lot
Two and a half years ago, I sat in the office of my therapist for my last appointment. "Just be sure you find somebody when you get there, okay?...you've done REALLY well....you're just not finished yet, you know?" Honestly that's a bit of a paraphrase but the sentiment was that. I'd done a LOT of hard work shoving my way through the heat of the hell that burned in my own soul, and passing through the heat had served to burn away a whole host of things my life didn't need anymore. I also got a lot stronger. Strongest I had been in like...a decade. I felt so emboldened with this new strength that I grabbed right up the false sense of security that is so perfectly human, and nodded my head yes - that I would find someone once I got there (here - where I live now) but I felt so confident that the urgency that flavored every word she spoke was just something I might have the luxury of ignoring...for just a little while.
So I did.
Two and a half years ago, with the guidance of this woman and the support of my then boyfriend (who is now my husband), I unlocked and re-entered rooms in my soul that I have described in past posts as dusty museums of shrouded, broken relics. I faced demons nose to nose. I get literal chills thinking about THOSE exercises. The gates of hell are not a casual hangout. I revisited past versions of myself and provided rescue to some of them.
I did the work. I cataloged it here. I thought it could maybe just be enough to get me through for a while. I DID know that I would need to do some more "sorting out" because here's the thing. As I walked carefully and slowly through the house that is my soul, I DID enter and completely renovate some of those rooms. They are still beautiful. They are delivered from the darkness of a locked door and diverted attention.
But this is what I did. I made those rooms so truly lovely so that maybe they could, in some way, compensate for the rooms for which I refused to pull the key from the pocket of my memory. I just couldn't do it. I just wanted to revel in the beauty of these parts that have been restored, but lately I've felt the floor even outside the locked rooms get too soft under my feet. The thing with damage is, if you don't stop the decay that it's causing, it just spreads.
On a day last week is when I noticed it as I passed by one of the locked rooms - I noticed the soft floor. It wasn't just creaky. It was rotting away and spreading closer....to all the work I had done. My attention shot up to look at the door of the rooms that held all the healing, and it hit me. This cannot touch those rooms. This cannot and should not happen. It's time to get to work.
I started the work, you guys. Right now I'm sort of at the point of standing there with my new contractor walking around surveying all the damage from all the storms and all the vandals. After an explanation including as much detail as I could manage (and lets be real - you know I can remember almost every. single. detail - they don't leave you), we each take a breath and then I hear a voice say the same thing I've heard other experienced voices say - "That's....a lot". I sheepishly smile with just my mouth and still sad eyes and try to find a way to explain away how my story is NOT THAT unique. There are a lot of people that have encountered their OWN storms and been attacked and ravaged by their OWN vandals, but then I feel silly because this is not the first job my contractor has assessed. I'm sure there have been many, many, many, and yet the reaction to MY re-do is that there is genuinely....a lot. So I have to acknowledge the opinion of the one who is far more expert than I am and take direction for which part to tackle first.
I'm scared. Because the truth of the matter is that we aren't talking about a house. I merely use that as an analogy that seems most easily relatable because even if you've never renovated a house, you've probably watched someone else do it. Also...houses become homes, and this life I live on this big round ball is the home for the story I leave for others to read so...we're calling it a house but...the truth is, this is a soul and this reno is actually more like surgery, and I have to be awake for every slice of the knife and every scrape as we find and pull out all the things that could threaten my growth. I don't like pain. I feel like I've had my fair share. There's been a lotta tough, and I'm tired, but this has to be done.
I'm also excited because when you do this work, you grow. You become that much more unstoppable in the race towards your dreams, and you become that much more usable to a God who needs runners without weights on their legs.
(oh the analogies) Forgive me. There's a lot swirling around through the rooms in my soul tonight, and finding a way to describe them gives me a way to at least begin to sort things out. Pray for me if you think of me. There is a portion of my life that requires address that is actually a period of years larger than the portion of my life that did not include these injuries. It's a big job. I've got a lot of small tasks and big ventures to sort out and complete because...you know...it's a lot.
Tuesday, October 3, 2017
On making my home
When I lived with Dan in Norman, there was this house we always passed that was a complete flip. To be honest, I really still feel significant confusion over why they didnt just tear it down or torch it - that's how completely stripped away it was. Here's the thing, though - it had really strong framework. There were beams for support and sections of good "guts". Over the months of my time living there, the contractors made some really amazing progress but there were days and some weeks that the construction came to a halt. If there were storms that were intense enough, they had to pause the rebuild because continuing during these period could risk damage to all the work they put in.They had to wait for the storms to end. I'm positive these storms left them feeling frustated - wanting just to continue so they could have the house in a condition that made it what it was always meant to be. But it had to just sit there up on stilts and cinder blocks until they could be sure that the elements didn't just destroy everything or even cause them harm.
I'm like that house. Ugh. Trust me. I was totally stripped out. I had nothing to offer anyone for a time. Those were my "dark days". I was definitely just very bare bones framework for a while. I was definitely in a state where those with experience and a heart to help me to become what I was meant to be came alongside me and acted as the cinder blocks and stilts. They stood with their feet squished down into the muck of my hurts and stood in the place where my new, better foundation was going to be poured.
As time went on, progress WAS made in the way I was constructed. Rot was aggressively removed and the good framework was reinforced. Gradually more elements were restored to the complete version I was becoming, but then storms came.
I don't know why I never connected this until tonight.
I have worked really hard on this Sarah rebuild. I have gone to an Architect with plans that couldn't be rivaled. These plans are the best - they are literally perfect, but the storms. As strong and pleasing as this plan is, there is just the inevitibility of storms. I haven't always been as smart as those builders. I'm the oblivious hammer swinger that didn't put up my tools and cover my vulnerable parts to protect them while the storms raged around me. I am the one who insisted that "Eh, this isn't something I should even care about. It's not THAT bad" until I watched some of my progress get marred or ruined or at least compromised - so guess what happened? I lost some of the progress I had made. Instead of realizing my priority during the storm was to protect my work and my safety, I left it out in the rain and snow and blistering heat. And I haven't even begun to address the issue of delinquent vandals.
Have you ever passed by one of these reconstructions and seen a spray painted image or ugly word artlessly scrawled across what is being made into something wonderful just so some idiot could leave their mark? Isn't there always the same list of questions that plays through your brain? "What idiot would do that?!" "How is someone so insecure that they take cheapest, most classless medium possible just to try to get attention or cause ruin to something so hopeful that someone was working on?" Also this one "Oh man....why couldn't the owners of this rebuild do something to protect all the work they're doing?"
Your brain also answers the questions too. The truth of life is that there are always people that are selfish or purposeless in their own lives that all they have is to try to ruin what someone else is doing. It is also true that, no matter how hard you try, sometimes its just a thing that these vandals will go to whatever lengths they see available to leave a mark of ugliness. There are also storms that, no matter what, will compromise even the best efforts at preservation.
So does the owner stand out front and yell reciprocations of trash? Does the owner continue to swing their hammer or sweep across the flooring if rain is coming down in buckets? Would the builder be productive focusing on how long or how torrential the rain is? No. Those would be stupid, fruitless behaviors.
Storms amd vandals happen. The truth is that sometimes these things do impede your progress. You can't protect against absolutely everything, and you look nothing but pathetic or crazy if you pretend they're not happening. I feel a sad kind of disappointed that I've spent this many years in a row feeling confused that my progress didn't continue or that vandals were able to leave their marks in my life.
Why did I not realize that storms are not a thing you can fight off? Why did I ever have the expectation for myself that I should see no break in progress during these storms? Why did I ever spend all that time out in the middle of this letting my soul get soaked to the bone? Why did my eye only ever see the progress I didn't make after all of this had passed its way over the "home" I'm making?
Oh self, what did you expect to have? Perfect? Did you expect to be perfect now? Why would you take blame for a storm you didn't want and couldn't have caused?
Its like, so simple. These things happen. Why did I expect to operate as if they never had? It seems so silly now to think of how I missed all of this simple idea that rebuilds just dont happen the same if a storm is happening or that there WILL be a mark left if someone is really insistent on leaving one.
So while I will not wallow in the grief of losing the progress I had made, I will realize that storms change your schedule. I will not take blame for things outside my control, but I will tell you this, as soon as the storm is done, I'm going to get right back up there and keep replacing and reinforcing and building new and finishing. I will keep away from the vandals, and once they're far enough away, I will scrub off all their graffiti. Because one day I will be able to say I am finished with my rebuild. My life is, in fact, now a safe place to stay after the sun goes down, and I've placed measures of safety around my perimeter so that the face of each brick or plank of wood is allowed to be nothing but strong and lovely.
I will work as efficiently as I am able to make all of this life into a place where I can shelter my heart but also others'. I will push every time the sun shines to finish off every floor and stair step and door frame so my life is a place where people make memories they cherish. I will do all of this so those that come after me can furrow their brows in a focused gaze or widen their eyes at what the carving experiences did to the woodwork of each baseboard. I want to build something so people feel at home by what I've left behind.
Funny thing about architects: they give you detailed plans for how things should be built, but never a single time did an honest one ever claim that it was never going to rain.
I'm like that house. Ugh. Trust me. I was totally stripped out. I had nothing to offer anyone for a time. Those were my "dark days". I was definitely just very bare bones framework for a while. I was definitely in a state where those with experience and a heart to help me to become what I was meant to be came alongside me and acted as the cinder blocks and stilts. They stood with their feet squished down into the muck of my hurts and stood in the place where my new, better foundation was going to be poured.
As time went on, progress WAS made in the way I was constructed. Rot was aggressively removed and the good framework was reinforced. Gradually more elements were restored to the complete version I was becoming, but then storms came.
I don't know why I never connected this until tonight.
I have worked really hard on this Sarah rebuild. I have gone to an Architect with plans that couldn't be rivaled. These plans are the best - they are literally perfect, but the storms. As strong and pleasing as this plan is, there is just the inevitibility of storms. I haven't always been as smart as those builders. I'm the oblivious hammer swinger that didn't put up my tools and cover my vulnerable parts to protect them while the storms raged around me. I am the one who insisted that "Eh, this isn't something I should even care about. It's not THAT bad" until I watched some of my progress get marred or ruined or at least compromised - so guess what happened? I lost some of the progress I had made. Instead of realizing my priority during the storm was to protect my work and my safety, I left it out in the rain and snow and blistering heat. And I haven't even begun to address the issue of delinquent vandals.
Have you ever passed by one of these reconstructions and seen a spray painted image or ugly word artlessly scrawled across what is being made into something wonderful just so some idiot could leave their mark? Isn't there always the same list of questions that plays through your brain? "What idiot would do that?!" "How is someone so insecure that they take cheapest, most classless medium possible just to try to get attention or cause ruin to something so hopeful that someone was working on?" Also this one "Oh man....why couldn't the owners of this rebuild do something to protect all the work they're doing?"
Your brain also answers the questions too. The truth of life is that there are always people that are selfish or purposeless in their own lives that all they have is to try to ruin what someone else is doing. It is also true that, no matter how hard you try, sometimes its just a thing that these vandals will go to whatever lengths they see available to leave a mark of ugliness. There are also storms that, no matter what, will compromise even the best efforts at preservation.
So does the owner stand out front and yell reciprocations of trash? Does the owner continue to swing their hammer or sweep across the flooring if rain is coming down in buckets? Would the builder be productive focusing on how long or how torrential the rain is? No. Those would be stupid, fruitless behaviors.
Storms amd vandals happen. The truth is that sometimes these things do impede your progress. You can't protect against absolutely everything, and you look nothing but pathetic or crazy if you pretend they're not happening. I feel a sad kind of disappointed that I've spent this many years in a row feeling confused that my progress didn't continue or that vandals were able to leave their marks in my life.
Why did I not realize that storms are not a thing you can fight off? Why did I ever have the expectation for myself that I should see no break in progress during these storms? Why did I ever spend all that time out in the middle of this letting my soul get soaked to the bone? Why did my eye only ever see the progress I didn't make after all of this had passed its way over the "home" I'm making?
Oh self, what did you expect to have? Perfect? Did you expect to be perfect now? Why would you take blame for a storm you didn't want and couldn't have caused?
Its like, so simple. These things happen. Why did I expect to operate as if they never had? It seems so silly now to think of how I missed all of this simple idea that rebuilds just dont happen the same if a storm is happening or that there WILL be a mark left if someone is really insistent on leaving one.
So while I will not wallow in the grief of losing the progress I had made, I will realize that storms change your schedule. I will not take blame for things outside my control, but I will tell you this, as soon as the storm is done, I'm going to get right back up there and keep replacing and reinforcing and building new and finishing. I will keep away from the vandals, and once they're far enough away, I will scrub off all their graffiti. Because one day I will be able to say I am finished with my rebuild. My life is, in fact, now a safe place to stay after the sun goes down, and I've placed measures of safety around my perimeter so that the face of each brick or plank of wood is allowed to be nothing but strong and lovely.
I will work as efficiently as I am able to make all of this life into a place where I can shelter my heart but also others'. I will push every time the sun shines to finish off every floor and stair step and door frame so my life is a place where people make memories they cherish. I will do all of this so those that come after me can furrow their brows in a focused gaze or widen their eyes at what the carving experiences did to the woodwork of each baseboard. I want to build something so people feel at home by what I've left behind.
Funny thing about architects: they give you detailed plans for how things should be built, but never a single time did an honest one ever claim that it was never going to rain.
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
On the Dark Days Being Over
When I was a kid, I remember my dad using a turn of phrase that he had learned from his mom. It was to describe adolescence in a girl. What a weird time in the life of a human - to be an adolescent girl. "Too old for toys, too young for boys". That was it. It was meant to be a funny way to describe that strange pergatorial state of being so 100% of 2 totally different things. To be honest, I originally found the phrase to be insultingly hopeless.
It wasn't though. I get it now. I get it now, because I'm here again, but it isn't the becoming more obviously adult-like or the moving forward from the days of play. It's the becoming of myself a version that has grown more instead of just grown up, and it's the moving away from the thing that had stunted me - the dark.
I had a lot of dark days and even darker nights. I will never forget the countless nights I stayed up after everyone else in my house had gone to sleep and laying flat in the carpet to show humility to the God I hoped was listening as I wept long enough and hard enough to leave puddles in the carpet of my living room. It was like a wrestling match I couldn't win to just convince the One I felt confident could change everything to just go ahead and change everything. Each morning was such a sickening realization that, though the sun had come up, the day had remained as dark as the night that had ushered it in. Years of this. For years I felt almost tangibly this oppression - this darkness. It sucked the oxygen out of every possible happiness. It completely consumed me, and no matter how hard I tried to keep my hands clutched around the things that I wanted so badly, all that was ever left were crumbs.
Things have changed though.
Last month I went on a trip with some friends of mine. About a year ago, one of my sweetest and dearest friends of my whole life convinced me to join a direct sales company with her. She hesitated knowing how much I detest this type of business, but we sat and talked and messaged and video chatted for hours thereafter about how to do it all in a way that would work for what we actually wanted to have. The result has been that we have gathered into our fold a larger group of friends of ours from present day all the way back to the childhood she and I began together. This company held a conference, and a few of us were able to go.
The first night we were there, I stood in the bathroom at the sink getting ready for the evening, and as I heard in the same room with me friends that I had known really, seriously almost my whole life but hadn't seen in years, I thought "Gosh, this really didn't even cost that much to get here. I mean, it was tight for me, but we could do this every year. By next year it won't be a problem at all.......Geez. I mean why are we all just now doing this? We should have been doing this every year already! Why weren't we?" And then I felt the blush of embarrassment creep up the cheeks of my soul because I had insensitively blurted out in my own mind this thing that was so obvious - the dark. It hadn't ever happened because every good and right and growing thing had been forced to blend into the shadow or shrivel up and die under the eclipse that the dark had created.
But I was there standing in that bathroom listening to the music of these voices of precious friends, so...that meant...
If I could actually see all these people face to face and actually hear their voices and actually be in that hotel room at that moment, one could only conclude that the darkness had lost its ability to rip out of my hands and my heart the things that I wanted to keep. It was gone. It was powerless. All those dark days and the darker nights...were over.
I finished what I was doing at the mirror and went back to my collection of smiling, chattering friends and took my first opportunity to tell them what my heart had just realized. I choked back tears while my friends shouted through their own sympathetic smiles for me to not cry right now! I smiled through the fog in my eyes and exulted in my new reality.
The dark days are over.
There's this thing happening now though. In passing from the thing of the darkness, naturally I am also crossing TO something. The light. The breathable air. The freedom. But it's a transition. It is not something abrupt like the last measure of one song and the beginning of a new one. It's more like I'm in the chorus between two versus or those strange few notes at the key change. I'm supremely grateful for the fact that this new melody is quite obviously already here, but there is part of me that just doesn't....
I just feel like those strange few notes. I know I'm not the measures of song from before and my life is no longer the narrative of the preceding verses, but I feel so "in between" because I can't yet see or hear what it is that I'm about to me or maybe even most of what I have already grown to be as these "notes" of transition play themselves out.
I don't like it.
I am a very concrete thinker. Just as linear as they come, I think. This is why most of my prose is really a compilation of analogies. I have to have a way to anchor something so abstract as a feeling in a soul to something I know I've seen or have at least learned about. There is no anchor for the unknown. There is not map where surprise is the only choice you have.
I have a tendency. I like to go back to what I know. Through the course of this year, as I have grown out of the "too old for toys" parallel to my experiences, I have felt a lot like I have just floated. I mean, really I have just kept very busy. I have 4 children. My husband works 2 jobs. I am essentially and really starting a small business this year with a team of people that is constantly and beautifully growing in number to whom I owe everything I can possibly offer in the way of support and instruction. I work full time hours while I also perform all the wonder and privilege of full time care to my youngest child who does not go to daycare. I handle most of the household tasks mainly because my husband isn't realistically home enough hours to manage much (although he is the first to help at his first opportunity). So I have enjoyed the busyness, but there are moments of silence. Those are what leave me confused. Those are the times that leave me feeling a bit lost because...
I am a doer. I am tenacious. I do not understand giving up on the things that are important to me. This has gotten me in trouble in the past because there are pursuits I should have abandoned long before I did. There is this thing in me that makes me say to the whole world that obstacles are something that just require strategy and persistence. This is the part of me that has survived some things that have robbed others of all their hope. This is something that is fueled by a Hope that comes from beyond my own person, but it is there and it has served me well. It's just that I don't actually need that intensity anymore.
Have you ever been to someone's house or have you ever been the person that gets up during your after dinner conversation and starts fiddling with a shelf of fallen over books or scrubbing an already clean countertop and then says "I just am not a person that likes to sit down. I have to be doing something"? It's like there's no off switch. It can create an atmosphere of anxiousness because of this inability to lower their intensity level. It's usually not good, because that comment of "I am not a person that likes to sit down" is usually a response to someone that says "Why don't you just leave that and come sit it in here while we talk?" The counter scrubber or book straightener doesn't realize something so tragic - their audience is asking for their undivided attention. They actually need that from the counter scrubber, and the counter scrubber's response is...insulting. It is at best illogical but at worst, it sends the message that the question asker is less important that the counter scrubber's compulsion to feel productive by completing tasks instead of investing in the heart of the question asker.
My spirit is the counter scrubber. I have had to stay so hyper vigilent for so many consecutive years and be ready to push through such strange and intense struggles that I have fidgeted in the living room of my life until I find myself standing and fiddling with things while I listened to all the beauty and newly lit wonder that my present life affords me. In my mind, I'm still offering attention to all of this beauty, but I have, indeed, felt a little rude to it because I keep finding myself feeling driven to do things like figuratively scrub the surfaces of my circumstances when...they're already in order. It has felt very off.
So I know WHY my heart has done all this - I had no choice but to live in a state of being ready to conquer things that have been my wildest nightmares at an hour of my life when I should have been at rest. This happened for so long that it has been ingrained in me.
It's is, though, a problem. I have now noticed the inappropriateness of my timing of the expending of this nervous energy. It can't stay like this because why? Because even if I feel like I'm looking up enough times to meet the gaze of the beauty in my life, invariably, there is also time that I'm spending looking down away from it at something that no longer needs my attention. Even if I feel like I'm listening to every word the beauty is saying to me, the scratch of the sponge or the flow of water over it to rinse away problems that aren't even there is going to drown out some of the precious noise. And then there's what I'm doing with the hands of my spirit. What if the beauty in my life should be held in my hands so I can really feel it and have it near to me, but my hands are busy with work that fills a need of fake productivity that will yield absolutely nothing except the enablement of a version of me that no longer exists?
It's time to sit now and enjoy the beauty. This is going to be hard for me, but it's time, and it's really just a choice to be made. The threats that breathed down my neck before have completely died. The miles of journey away from the land of withered dreams and toxic air have been traveled. They are behind me now. I'm at the new place. There is no more fire burning away the beauty in my life. I don't have to protect myself from that any more. The sad notes of the old song or the previous verse have played, and the evidence of their noise is fading to a decibel no one can hear anymore. Yes I am still in a transition, but honestly, I'm at the top end of it now.
This is seriously terrifying to me. Do you know this part of life where, if you go through a higher incidence of repeated or constant loss, you just feel sure that every lovely thing is dangled in front of your eyes just so it can be cruelly snatched away? I guess that feeling is the transition. The thing, though, is that there have now been several years where lovely things aren't dangled in front of my eyes. They are wrapped up and then set in my hands - these times, these experiences, these changes in who I am, are gifts that I have now been allowed to keep. And now I am starting to see more and more and bigger and bigger gifts being sent in my direction, and the nature of these gifts is that they are impossible to steal.
So I need to have a seat, don't I? It is really finally time for my soul to rest and enjoy all of this, because we have pushed really hard to get here. We have walked all those miles and made it through all those wars, and now it's quiet. Now it's time to dwell in the peace that I was commanded to find. Now it's time to be healed.
It wasn't though. I get it now. I get it now, because I'm here again, but it isn't the becoming more obviously adult-like or the moving forward from the days of play. It's the becoming of myself a version that has grown more instead of just grown up, and it's the moving away from the thing that had stunted me - the dark.
I had a lot of dark days and even darker nights. I will never forget the countless nights I stayed up after everyone else in my house had gone to sleep and laying flat in the carpet to show humility to the God I hoped was listening as I wept long enough and hard enough to leave puddles in the carpet of my living room. It was like a wrestling match I couldn't win to just convince the One I felt confident could change everything to just go ahead and change everything. Each morning was such a sickening realization that, though the sun had come up, the day had remained as dark as the night that had ushered it in. Years of this. For years I felt almost tangibly this oppression - this darkness. It sucked the oxygen out of every possible happiness. It completely consumed me, and no matter how hard I tried to keep my hands clutched around the things that I wanted so badly, all that was ever left were crumbs.
Things have changed though.
Last month I went on a trip with some friends of mine. About a year ago, one of my sweetest and dearest friends of my whole life convinced me to join a direct sales company with her. She hesitated knowing how much I detest this type of business, but we sat and talked and messaged and video chatted for hours thereafter about how to do it all in a way that would work for what we actually wanted to have. The result has been that we have gathered into our fold a larger group of friends of ours from present day all the way back to the childhood she and I began together. This company held a conference, and a few of us were able to go.
The first night we were there, I stood in the bathroom at the sink getting ready for the evening, and as I heard in the same room with me friends that I had known really, seriously almost my whole life but hadn't seen in years, I thought "Gosh, this really didn't even cost that much to get here. I mean, it was tight for me, but we could do this every year. By next year it won't be a problem at all.......Geez. I mean why are we all just now doing this? We should have been doing this every year already! Why weren't we?" And then I felt the blush of embarrassment creep up the cheeks of my soul because I had insensitively blurted out in my own mind this thing that was so obvious - the dark. It hadn't ever happened because every good and right and growing thing had been forced to blend into the shadow or shrivel up and die under the eclipse that the dark had created.
But I was there standing in that bathroom listening to the music of these voices of precious friends, so...that meant...
If I could actually see all these people face to face and actually hear their voices and actually be in that hotel room at that moment, one could only conclude that the darkness had lost its ability to rip out of my hands and my heart the things that I wanted to keep. It was gone. It was powerless. All those dark days and the darker nights...were over.
I finished what I was doing at the mirror and went back to my collection of smiling, chattering friends and took my first opportunity to tell them what my heart had just realized. I choked back tears while my friends shouted through their own sympathetic smiles for me to not cry right now! I smiled through the fog in my eyes and exulted in my new reality.
The dark days are over.
There's this thing happening now though. In passing from the thing of the darkness, naturally I am also crossing TO something. The light. The breathable air. The freedom. But it's a transition. It is not something abrupt like the last measure of one song and the beginning of a new one. It's more like I'm in the chorus between two versus or those strange few notes at the key change. I'm supremely grateful for the fact that this new melody is quite obviously already here, but there is part of me that just doesn't....
I just feel like those strange few notes. I know I'm not the measures of song from before and my life is no longer the narrative of the preceding verses, but I feel so "in between" because I can't yet see or hear what it is that I'm about to me or maybe even most of what I have already grown to be as these "notes" of transition play themselves out.
I don't like it.
I am a very concrete thinker. Just as linear as they come, I think. This is why most of my prose is really a compilation of analogies. I have to have a way to anchor something so abstract as a feeling in a soul to something I know I've seen or have at least learned about. There is no anchor for the unknown. There is not map where surprise is the only choice you have.
I have a tendency. I like to go back to what I know. Through the course of this year, as I have grown out of the "too old for toys" parallel to my experiences, I have felt a lot like I have just floated. I mean, really I have just kept very busy. I have 4 children. My husband works 2 jobs. I am essentially and really starting a small business this year with a team of people that is constantly and beautifully growing in number to whom I owe everything I can possibly offer in the way of support and instruction. I work full time hours while I also perform all the wonder and privilege of full time care to my youngest child who does not go to daycare. I handle most of the household tasks mainly because my husband isn't realistically home enough hours to manage much (although he is the first to help at his first opportunity). So I have enjoyed the busyness, but there are moments of silence. Those are what leave me confused. Those are the times that leave me feeling a bit lost because...
I am a doer. I am tenacious. I do not understand giving up on the things that are important to me. This has gotten me in trouble in the past because there are pursuits I should have abandoned long before I did. There is this thing in me that makes me say to the whole world that obstacles are something that just require strategy and persistence. This is the part of me that has survived some things that have robbed others of all their hope. This is something that is fueled by a Hope that comes from beyond my own person, but it is there and it has served me well. It's just that I don't actually need that intensity anymore.
Have you ever been to someone's house or have you ever been the person that gets up during your after dinner conversation and starts fiddling with a shelf of fallen over books or scrubbing an already clean countertop and then says "I just am not a person that likes to sit down. I have to be doing something"? It's like there's no off switch. It can create an atmosphere of anxiousness because of this inability to lower their intensity level. It's usually not good, because that comment of "I am not a person that likes to sit down" is usually a response to someone that says "Why don't you just leave that and come sit it in here while we talk?" The counter scrubber or book straightener doesn't realize something so tragic - their audience is asking for their undivided attention. They actually need that from the counter scrubber, and the counter scrubber's response is...insulting. It is at best illogical but at worst, it sends the message that the question asker is less important that the counter scrubber's compulsion to feel productive by completing tasks instead of investing in the heart of the question asker.
My spirit is the counter scrubber. I have had to stay so hyper vigilent for so many consecutive years and be ready to push through such strange and intense struggles that I have fidgeted in the living room of my life until I find myself standing and fiddling with things while I listened to all the beauty and newly lit wonder that my present life affords me. In my mind, I'm still offering attention to all of this beauty, but I have, indeed, felt a little rude to it because I keep finding myself feeling driven to do things like figuratively scrub the surfaces of my circumstances when...they're already in order. It has felt very off.
So I know WHY my heart has done all this - I had no choice but to live in a state of being ready to conquer things that have been my wildest nightmares at an hour of my life when I should have been at rest. This happened for so long that it has been ingrained in me.
It's is, though, a problem. I have now noticed the inappropriateness of my timing of the expending of this nervous energy. It can't stay like this because why? Because even if I feel like I'm looking up enough times to meet the gaze of the beauty in my life, invariably, there is also time that I'm spending looking down away from it at something that no longer needs my attention. Even if I feel like I'm listening to every word the beauty is saying to me, the scratch of the sponge or the flow of water over it to rinse away problems that aren't even there is going to drown out some of the precious noise. And then there's what I'm doing with the hands of my spirit. What if the beauty in my life should be held in my hands so I can really feel it and have it near to me, but my hands are busy with work that fills a need of fake productivity that will yield absolutely nothing except the enablement of a version of me that no longer exists?
It's time to sit now and enjoy the beauty. This is going to be hard for me, but it's time, and it's really just a choice to be made. The threats that breathed down my neck before have completely died. The miles of journey away from the land of withered dreams and toxic air have been traveled. They are behind me now. I'm at the new place. There is no more fire burning away the beauty in my life. I don't have to protect myself from that any more. The sad notes of the old song or the previous verse have played, and the evidence of their noise is fading to a decibel no one can hear anymore. Yes I am still in a transition, but honestly, I'm at the top end of it now.
This is seriously terrifying to me. Do you know this part of life where, if you go through a higher incidence of repeated or constant loss, you just feel sure that every lovely thing is dangled in front of your eyes just so it can be cruelly snatched away? I guess that feeling is the transition. The thing, though, is that there have now been several years where lovely things aren't dangled in front of my eyes. They are wrapped up and then set in my hands - these times, these experiences, these changes in who I am, are gifts that I have now been allowed to keep. And now I am starting to see more and more and bigger and bigger gifts being sent in my direction, and the nature of these gifts is that they are impossible to steal.
So I need to have a seat, don't I? It is really finally time for my soul to rest and enjoy all of this, because we have pushed really hard to get here. We have walked all those miles and made it through all those wars, and now it's quiet. Now it's time to dwell in the peace that I was commanded to find. Now it's time to be healed.
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