Maturity

Scar tissue bulges out where the fissures in my heart used to be. Feeling only pushes at the untouched sections, which are fewer and smaller as the breakage continues to spread. I think that soon those rare sections shall be gone altogether. Even now, I call out, but no answer. I harden myself so that I am not hurt any further by the continued unresponsiveness to my plight. I drown myself in books, getting lost in the lives of fictional characters whose daily existences somehow seem more exciting than my own. Stories with happy endings. As I sit here on my couch with my tiny dog laying hammocked on the blanket over my legs, I wonder if we each have to be our own knights in shining armor. We are all broken people, and we cannot count on another human being to save us from ourselves. We have to step out with the measure of faith and strength that God has allotted to us and become our own heroes. We have to rescue ourselves and use whatever we have left over to show others the way. But they, too, will need to walk with their own allotment of strength and faith, not with ours. Life, in the beginning and the end, is a solitary battle. We pass through each other's lives and touch each other in ways ranging from the minute to the profound as we allow God to lead us or as we chose to lead ourselves. But in the end, it comes down to the truth in the words that Mother Teresa wrote, "in the final analysis, it is between you and God: It was never between you and them anyway." We must--I must--step out and take responsibility for who I am without waiting for someone else to make it better. Maturity is not about age, it's about the recognition of the nature of human power, and, in the spiritual sense, it's about the trust in and reliance on a Higher power where human power has failed.