I realize Thanksgiving was a few days ago, but I need to do this post this morning to keep my heart in a place of gratitude instead of a place of griping about how I had to wake up early and come back to work today after 4 days off. So here is what I'm most thankful for this year:
~My job. As much as I don't want to be here this morning, I'm so grateful to have a job that provides some financial stability and some personal fulfillment.
~My home and my material possessions. I know they are just things, but I am blessed that God has shared them with me, and I pray that I would neither take them for granted nor put too much value on them since my real treasure is in heaven.
~Church. I am grateful for the opporunity to connect and grow with other believers and to have people with similar hearts to walk the journey with.
~My education. I sometimes take for granted how valuable eduation and intellect are because I've never really known life without either. But when I encounter people who haven't had the same opportunities, I remember how lucky I am.
~My dog, for her carefree personality and unconditional love. She makes me smile when I need to the most.
~My family, both biological and in-law. I grew up with such close ties to my family, and I am thankful for knowing that kind of love. I am also blessed to really enjoy my in-laws.
~My friends. Even as our relationships have changed over the years with moves and marriages and new jobs and churches, I'm thankful for the bond that holds us together through the changes.
~My mother who has taught me so much about beauty, grace, and strength, and how these are all sharpened through pain. Some people are afraid to become their mothers, I think I would be lucky to do so.
~My incredible husband. I am truly blessed to have married my best friend, someone I can share everything with and who loves me as I am. We make each other better people.
~Most of all, Jesus. Because of His blood, I can come before God with a clean heart and I no longer have to be a prisoner to my own sinful ways. He changed my life by sacrificing His. I'm so grateful to serve a God who wants a relationship with me and pursues my heart with such fervor. He has overflowed my cup, and these ten things are only part of what He's blessed me with.
Last night at dinner, my friends and I somehow got on the subject of a person from my past who wronged me. As soon as the topic came up, my mood went from happy-go-lucky to fuming mad. It has been several years and so much has changed in my life since then, but somewhere in my heart I have been harboring bitterness and it came to the surface in a very ugly way last night at simply the mention of a name. I know that the Christian thing to do is forgive and forget. I serve a God who has removed my sins from me as far as the east is from the west (Psalm 103:12). I have no right to fill my heart with unforgiveness when I have been forgiven so much.
Nevertheless, knowing this in my head and transferring it to my heart is a more difficult task than it may seem like on paper (or on the computer screen as the case may be). Even with the understanding that I am called to forgive just as I have been forgiven, I find myself feeling an awful lot like Jean Valjean from Les Miserables, craving revenge on those who have harmed me. See, the tricky thing about forgiveness is that I have to really let go and let God handle the situation, trusting in His sovereignty even if it means that He opts to forgive the person who hurt me and that person never has to suffer for the wrong done to me. Part of the beauty of God's grace is that He extends it to everyone equally, but part of the challenge as a human is getting over the desire for human justice to be served.
A key for me in the letting go process has been reminding myself (usually over and over again) that forgiveness does not mean that I am saying what happened was OK. Wrong was still done and I can still call it wrong, but forgivness means that I no longer hold the wrong against the person in my heart, where, quite frankly, it is hurting me much more than it's hurting the person against whom I hold the grudge. My unforgiveness and the resulting bitterness has driven a tangible wedge between God and me which has severely stunted my spiritual growth over the last few years. I have been praying to get back to the place where I was before I let this person too far into my life, and I couldn't understand why God wasn't magically changing my heart until last night when all the hurt and anger came pouring out of me over tortilla chips and a bowl of queso.
I cannot be right with God until I am right with my brothers and sisters (Matthew 5:22-23). When I am allowing anger and bitterness to fester in my heart, this rot subjects me to the same judgment that I am casting on others. The important point here is that I am the one allowing anger and bitterness into my life. God is greater than these things, and I can choose to cast the anger and bitterness out in the name of Jesus instead of silently letting them grow. I have been struggling for years to pray for my enemies as Jesus instructed (Matthew 5:44). I struggle because I find the task of praying blessings into the lives of people at whom I am still angry an impossible mandate. Forgiveness must come first.
On the car ride home from dinner last night, I poured my heart out to God in prayer. I prayed for Him to help me to truly forgive and let go of the hurt and pain that I have been holding onto for far too long. I confessed to Him that I am not strong enough in my humanity to forgive without His help. I praised Him for His grace in granting me free will, as well as for His grace in allowing all of us to know the beauty of the human experience, including our capacity for pain and for healing. In situations where we have been deeply wounded, our prayers to help us forgive may need to be a daily occurance, or even a moment-by-moment occurance. I am committed to giving my wounds up to God as often as necessary until I stop taking them back again and truly let them go. I am committed to this task because I trust God's will, and I am indebted to Him more deeply than I could ever pay for all that He has forgiven me.
Maybe it's because it's the holidays or maybe it's because I'm finally ready to process my feelings almost 5 years later, but I've been thinking about my father a lot lately. I spent most of my life from puberty on angry at him. I was angry at all the ways he hurt me over the years and all the mixed messages his words sent me. I blamed him for so much. I remember when I was in therapy in college for my eating disorder, my dad asked me what I talk to my therapist about. I think I meekly said something like, "Oh, just life in general. You know, school and stress," but I was really thinking, "You, Dad."
It wasn't until my recent ponderings that I began to accept responsibilty for my own role in our torn relationship. He might have been confused about how to handle my budding pre-teen hormones, but I certainly did nothing to make his job as a father easier. In fact, I was pretty nasty to him. I didn't recognize his insecurities and I took his moods so personally that I began to build up a wall around myself. A wall that I would not let him penetrate even up to his demise. He reacted to me based on his insecurities, and I lashed out at him based on mine. Self-defense in the face of a perceived attack. On both sides. A vicious cycle that only death could stop.
Soon after my father's death, I had to face my own guilt about not being able to save him. At the time I felt for some reason this was something I could have done that day or the day before. Now I realize it is a process I would have had to begin years before. I prided myself on my piety, but I didn't show unconditional and overflowing love to the man who helped conceive me and raise me into adulthood. I thought I was honoring my parents by obeying them, but obedience and duty aren't enough. I loved him from behind my wall, but not well enough or clearly enough for him to trust my love. I suppose he loved me in the same type of way, and I faulted him for that without realizing I was guilty of the same crime. We perpetuated each other's insecurities instead of healing them and so the cycle continued.
I wanted so badly to make him proud. I thought if I was good enough, he'd finally give me a clear message that he loved me unconditionally. And then I thought that I would be free to give him the same message. Now I see that he pobably wanted the same acceptance from me that I craved from him. I was so angry that I never let him feel like he was good enough. I hurt him to protect myself and he did the same. We hurt each other with our own self-obsession that further built up the wall separating us. And almost 29 years after we first met and 5 years after his death, I still have a lot of healing to do.
My brother got married last night. The ceremony was beautiful, his new wife was beautiful, I ate too much, drank a lot of free wine, and danced the night away. I woke up this morning without a hangover but with an inexplicable feeling of emptiness in my stomach. I know that at events like weddings I am painfully cognizant of how little is left of my family. My mother and I were the only people at the wedding who bear any realtion to my brother. But I don't think it is grief at the loss of any of my relatives that left me feeling like I had a hole in my stomach this morning. I also know that I am harboring some bitterness about my exclusion from participating in the wedding as anything more than a guest, but I don't think that's the reason for my emptiness either. My brother has been with Lauren for over five years, and they've been engaged for 4 of those years. I have had plenty of time to prepare for their marriage. But today I feel like something is different. I talked to John about it, and he told me that he felt the same kind of feeling after his younger sister got married. There is something about marriage that makes everything permanently different. My brother is no longer really my "baby brother," he's now an adult with a wife. We are more separate than we were before. I am definitely happy for him and for Lauren, but I feel like a door has shut. Growing up, my brother and I were very close. We did not battle any type of sibling rivalry and we certainly did not fight the way brothers and sisters often do. As we became adults, we grew apart instead of closer together. I realize now that our relationship will never be what it was again. We have new families now and what we had cannot be restored. It is that change that I am internally mourning right now. I asked John why I didn't feel this ball in my stomach when the two of us got married. He said that it's different when it's us. It's not so different in terms of the change that marriage brings, but it is certainly different in terms of my feelings and my perception. I've been married for almost 7 months, but it took my brother's wedding for it to hit me that I'm not a little girl anymore.
It's only been 6 months since our wedding, and I have already managed to break two of the glasses we received as gifts. I am too exhausted and there is not enough space in the kitchen. And I guess, too, I'm naturally clumsy and these other issues just amplify the problem. Each time a glass shatters, I list my inadequacies as a wife in my head. I'm not a good enough housekeeper, and I know it. That's why there are glasses on the counters to be broken. I work more than my husband and I am out of the house more than him, yet I'm still left to do the bulk of the clean-up duties because I have a lower tolerance for squalor than he does. I'm depressed, and that has nothing to do with my marriage because I have been depressed since puberty. My in-love-ness made me forget about it for awhile, but as winter has set in, the feelings have all come back to me. I don't like my job. I don't like any jobs, and I think that I am probably not meant to work since I can't imagine being fulfilled at anything that I would classify as drudgery. To me, all desk jobs are drudgery. At least all the ones I've held. And I'm not qualified to do anything away from a desk. I'm also sick again, which I hate, but can't seem to prevent these days no matter how much fruit I eat and how many vitamins I take. Last night when the glass broke, I stared at the chunks and began choking on my own breath. Wheezing and coughing on the wheezes. Trying to breathe, but needing my abuterol to remind my lungs how to work. My asthma tends to leave me alone in sunnier weather when my health is also better, but everything in my life shuts down in the winter. I'm not happy, and I can't fix that anymore than I can find all the shards of glass and Krazy glue them back together like new. I shouldn't expect to be happy; happiness was never part of the plan once we got kicked out of the Garden. The Bible is clear that many trials will befall us. Joy and peace can exist in the midst of trial, but happiness is different from joy and peace. When I focus on the broken glass, I find all three of these states elusive. Someone said that when we love more in one direction (i.e., God's direction), we increase our ability to love in all directions (because God fills us with His love for others when we focus on Him). I suppose my New Year goal should be to focus on loving in that one direction since anything else I cling to will slip through my fingers like a glass before it breaks. Happiness may never factor into the equation, but joy and peace run deeper than happiness. Happiness can shatter like a glass hitting the ceramic tile, but joy and peace can overcome broken glasses.
I just finished reading The Ice Queen by Alice Hoffman. It was a quick read that began with the narrator's mother dying when the narrator was a child and her mother was exactly 30. The rest of the narrator's story is colored by this experience--a moment that changed the course of her life and forever changed her as well. Towards the end of the novel, the narrator is watching monarch butterflies migrate and she thinks, "You wouldn't think there could be so many butterflies in the world. You wouldn't think everything could change in an instant. But there are, and it does."
The holiday seasons have been bittersweet for me since I lost my own father in an instant in 2002. I still don't know exactly what happened that day. I know that he was there when I went to work and gone when I came home. What happened in between will forever be a mystery. I know firsthand how a single moment can change a life. The most dramatic of life changes occur in the small moments that refuse to be ignored. I wonder if my father knew about such change that morning when he told me to "be good" on my way out the door.
The narrator in The Ice Queen believes that she ended her mother's life with an idle and selfish childhood wish. I do not believe I wished my father's life away, but I do wish that I had loved him better and appreciated him more while he was here. The narrator wondered if her mother's last thoughts had been of her and her brother. She notes that her mother "probably didn't even consider the way we would miss her. Each and every minute of each and every day." I wonder, too, if my father would have known if he thought about it or if I was always too caught up in myself to give him any indication of how badly my heart would break if he ever left. And it is that kind of miss that I carry with me at all times--the eternally deep emptiness that comes from losing something that you didn't know was so valuable until it was gone.
Maybe if I let it, time would close my wound, but I honestly don't want to heal fully from my loss. I want to carry that pain with me because it reminds of how fragile life is, how precious each breath we take and each sunrise we see. I also want to carry the pain with me because other than pictures, it is all I have left of him. The narrator's pain and guilt froze her, my hope is that my pain has melted me some and will continue to melt me as long as I hold onto it.
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.
I see the bitterness in her eyes. So pungent that I can taste it on the tip of my tongue. I don't want to swallow and take it inside myself, but I can't help it; swallowing is in my nature. I feel her hurt burning me all the way down my throat, but I'm sure it is merely secondhand smoke compared to what eats at her gut when she sees me. Her lips can't form the words to express her disappointment, but I feel it in my depths nonetheless. I got caught up in a tropical storm and left too soon without really saying goodbye. And truth be told, I didn't put up much of a fight when the storm came. I did not cover my windows with wood or secure any part of me with chains. For what did I ride on the edge of the wind but to chase what I thought would warm my toes at night? A fun ride, but more costly than what I had first counted. And my toes are still cold, warmed only by the extra blankets on my side of the bed. And after all that we spent, neither of us yet believes in "the one."
Sometimes I wonder if I was born sad. Like maybe my DNA has a flaw in it, or a missing piece that makes depression an inevitable struggle for me. But then I remember my childhood. I was happy and carefree as a youngster. I didn't become sad and hopeless-feeling until puberty barged into my life. Maybe my genetic flaw is linked directly with those hormones that surged through my body when puberty forced its way in. I'm sure that depression, like other mental and physical disorders, could have genetic ties, and perhaps in some of us, those ties are sealed with the release of certain chemicals into our physiologies.
On the other hand, even before I first felt the looming sadness and hopelessness of depression, I remember thinking as a child that I was too happy and my life was too good. I actually remember thinking even in those days that if there should be tragedy in my life. So maybe its not genetic at all; maybe I wished the sorrow on myself. Maybe my depression is something I created for myself to help me to feel real (as the Goo Goo Dolls said, "When everything feels like the movies/Yeah, you bleed just to know you're alive"). Or maybe it is a spiritual problem that I brought on myself because the missing piece in my DNA makes me uncomfortable with contentment.
In spite of my thoughts, words, and actions to the contrary, I buy into the theory that sadness is an internal problem and not an external one. Every time I start a new job, I get depressed because it does not instantly fulfill me or make me happy. I have changed careers--not just places of employment, but total career--three times since I graduated from college in May of 2000. Since I began my most recent job, I've already started looking for ways to get back into my previous field. With these frequent switches, I am looking for a satisfaction in my job that I won't find. I want my job to fill the emptiness that I need to work with God to fill before I even step through my office door. I am happy with my marriage, but even my husband does not fill the voids in my soul. Sometimes I get mad and frustrated, because I want John to have more power than he does in making me whole. In the name of finding wholeness, I have made Florida out to be a warm paradise where I could move and never feel sad. But I know that moving to Florida will not make me happy. It may be a temporary feeling of happiness, but in the end, that move would prove empty and meaningless, too. Just like the writer in Ecclesiastes noted, everything in life amounts to nothing more than chasing after the wind.
Ultimately, I am convinced that sadness is what killed my father and both of my paternal grandparents. I see these feelings eventually destroying me, too. Even if I can get them under reins with counseling or medication (neither of which I am utilizing at the moment), the sadness will triumph if I do not trust God to fill the voids within me. I have to hold onto the fact that His grace is sufficient for me to walk through my seemingly endless pain. My hope should lie in my belief that eternity will not hold sadness. But I do not trust myself to believe this 50 years from now when I am still chasing after the wind and finding everything to be for nought.
According to a personality test I took several years ago, I am an "idealist." The description of "idealist" on my test results stated that I see the good in people and situations and believe that those same people and situations can become even better. I also believe, according to this test, that I can personally make a difference in the betterment of people, situations, and our world in general.
At this moment, as I sit here staring at my lonely computer, I ponder whether or not the same results would materialize if I took that personality test today.
I know that I got into my profession because of the idealism that underpins my personality. Certainly, the paycheck was not the reason that I used my college and graduate school years to become an educator. No, I am confident that I am sitting in this windowless office because I arrogantly believed that I could help people who could not otherwise help themselves.
I say "arrogantly" because today I recognize that helping people must be a mutual endeavor. In the end, it does not matter what I do by myself.
I have a huge heart for helping people who lack the resources--both financial and otherwise--to rise above their circumstances. Specifically, my compassion is directed at helping the poor and neglected members of our society. Even more specifically than that, I'm interested in helping the youth of that poor and neglected social group. So here I am--a school counselor with ideals that are slowly being tarnished by the people I came to "save."
Supergirl I am not. Supergirl would be able to lift everyone up to a higher place. I can't even lift one without some desire on their part to be lifted.
The cliche is true: you can't help those who don't want to be helped. When I try to offer help, my efforts are often slapped down by the very person whom I'm trying to assist. When my efforts are not slapped down, they are either not recognized at all or not accepted as good enough. Surprisingly, even some of the people who seek assistance at the same time think that they are entitled to even more. I guess a sense of entitlement is a by-product of living in the United States.
In spite of daily rejection, I get up in the dark each morning and drive to work with some blind idealistic hope that today I will make a difference.