As I go on with this series of singleness and how the sorrow that some feel in singleness is not an isolated incident to singleness alone – I am realizing that it is really about expectations that ALL of us have for our lives that can keep us in bondage. Our clinging to these unrealistic, childish expectations keeps us from moving into adulthood and keeps us from moving into the direction God created us to go.
Through these thoughts I am realizing that – while my grieving is heavy and torrential at some points – that this grief very well could be the best sign that I am not staying who I was…that I am growing into the adult that I will need to be in order to move forward with the call on my life – whatever that might be. That I am saying good-bye to my childish ways, my childish dreams and learning to “eat the solid food of adulthood”.
I am learning to allow myself to look at my life not thru the lens of the Accuser who says, “You won’t surely die if you hold onto that dream of…”
and instead….
I am learning to see reality thru the lens of Jesus, who assures me that if I die to myself (that childish refusal to let go of my ways), that if I pick up His cross (his lens of the TRUE reality to this world, because He looks at it the way that He created it to be)
==> then I will eventually find that full and abundant life He promises. That I will eventually find His peace that transcends all understanding and will see that His plans are really far, way better than my childish dreams ever could be.
I have to say that it really amazes me that I can even write the above at this point…for right in the midst of my grieving process, for right when I literally felt myself starting to turn a corner towards the light…for right as I went up to my mailbox last Friday I felt the breathe of fresh air starting to blow as I could feel myself starting to settle into my new life…God dropped what felt like an atomic bomb on me. I could literally feel the difference in the air between my life and my thoughts before I opened the mailbox and the moment after I opened it. Another earthquake – or maybe an after shock – was about to take place.
The verse I quoted a few posts back, Isaiah 54:10, about the mountains being shaken and the hills being removed…that is all I can think of now that this bomb has gone off in my inner world. For the next several days, I would have an extremely hard time remembering the end of that verse about how God’s love for me cannot be shaken, and his covenant of peace won’t be removed.
As I read the letter that – for the moment – irrevocably alters the path I thought I was on and thought God was calling me to, disbelief rushed over me. Then embarrassment and perhaps even shame as the voices of my past – voices I have learned to put in their place, so I thought – came rushing out of somewhere screaming their horrible thoughts about how inadequate they think I am. Voices that I am working so hard at training to go away completely had a gateway right back into my conscious mind. And as I sat with what this letter did to my life and where to go from here…the biggest wound in my life came rushing to the forefront: my rejection wound.
As I have learned in my Life Skills class, there are 5 major traumas that can lead a child to get arrested in development. Things like molestation, incest, physical/verbal abuse. Yet, as awful and horrific as all these things are…the #1 trauma that any one child can receive is …you guessed it – rejection. For while all these other abuses to a child are horrible atrocities…they all eventually lead the child to feel rejected by the adult world, and eventually the child will learn to reject her/himself as well. This rejection can lead to a multitude of other issues – such as lack of trust, hope, self-confidence, purpose, etc. – what Erik Erikson calls competencies that a child must master in order to become a fully functional emotional adult.
While consciously I know what God says, what the bible says about being accepted as one of His own…when you are dealing with a childhood of rejection that runs right smack into an instance when you are rejected as an adult – the floodgates of despair, of heartache and everything in between are thrown wide open…and it can become really hard to sort thru all of the different feelings and thoughts…and it can be really hard to stop the tears. It was like the “stuck” feeling I have had for a few months now… all the grief I felt stuck at the top of chest…in the heart shockra area if you know where that is…well, it seems to have been finally dislodged…along with a multitude of emotions toward the one person I thought I could trust no matter what, that I thought had my back and that I could understand Him and what He was all about.
As I laid in bed awake in the middle of the night that night…I felt the darkness start to fold in over the corners where light had just been. The corners of hope, joy, grace and freedom were folded over by lostness, confusion, “no assurance”…and biggest of all – that last corner was that God was “not trustworthy”. God was not trustworthy…His voice was not trustworthy. All that I thought I had heard from Him these past months, I couldn’t trust it. It’s like I can hear Him cracking up saying, “Just kidding!”
All of this led me to another realization. See, up until Friday I can honestly say, after all that I have been through in my life, that I have never been angry at God. I somehow have been able to accept the life I have had…and fully believed that even thru the pain and suffering that God was able to use that to make me into who I was. So I thought.
Yet here it was, plain as day in the middle of the night: I was angry. Livid to be exact. Angry at God for – well for everything. For taking my mother when I was so young, for never having a father, for the end of my marriage and my dreams for a better life. For ripping my life apart at the seams and not giving me much to hold on to these last few months. For giving me promises, so I thought, yet not coming through on any of them yet. For telling me to go a certain way, so I thought, and then closing the door before I even got my pinkie toe through, let alone enough of my foot wedged in to keep it propped open. Yep – there it was…I was plain ol’ angry…and I felt completely justified in saying so to Him.
From somewhere down deep inside my body, an outpouring of anger was surfacing, breaking through all the pretense that kept me saying, “well at least I don’t have anger.” I was too tired to scream and yell at Him…but my tears said it all. They were a free flowing stream of pain that continued to flow for an hour when I should have been sleeping. They were a free flowing stream of despair the next day, quite inconveniently as it was a day I didn’t have to time to sit around in private. No, instead found myself sitting around a table with 7 strangers wondering who the teary eyed mess of a girl was sitting amongst them. Even being among these strangers my silent anger seethed for they were there to do something I felt God had kept me from doing at this time…to join the body of believers at a church that has been the source of so much grace and comfort to me this past year.
This really was just the icing on the cake of last week actually. I had come back from Hawaii, healthy and smiling with some direction…and on the 2nd day back, after dropping the kids off at school, stopping by my ol’ house of 8 years to pick up some mail…I had to pull over to allow the pouring out of my tears to slow enough so I could drive on. I had just put my make-up on for goodness sakes…and it only left me with dark circles around my puffy eyes. Note to self: either don’t wear make-up or buy waterproof mascara. Yet, not sure even the waterproof stuff can survive the episodes of Niagara Falls.
So this is where I was at…the real deal, the raw truth of my life this last week. For the first time in my almost 16 year walk with God I found myself at one of the crisis of faith I had heard so many others talk about – and was always so thankful that it wasn’t me…that that would never be me really. I knew life without God and wanted nothing to do with it. Yet, here I was…questioning if following God was really something I was cut out to do…if it really was for my benefit, if I really wanted to continue now that something I had wanted so desperately hadn’t panned out.
I was quite unprepared to be hit by all these feelings and thoughts. As I started questioning everything about my life, about what I thought that I had heard from God…I realized that it was really myself that I was questioning. Could I trust myself to hear God correctly? Was I just making stuff up? I know the mind is a marvelous deep mystery even in our day-and-age – so I know I could quite easily have made stuff up. Oh boy, where was I to go from here????
Stay tuned as I practice swallowing my pride and share what it was that led to these newest revelations and how I am struggling my way thru this time…
