How do you know where to begin when you are beginning to unfold yourself? Over and over in my brain I hear that I am tired, and I question how many times I need to turn inward to focus on myself before I get it, whatever it is. I know that life is full of changes and mile markers and that our life will need to adjust, continually. But adjusting to life and what is around me shouldn’t cause or need me to change who I am at my core – adjusting to life doesn’t mean that I lose my identity and create a new one. Yet, here I sit – march of 2010 – embarking on a journey that I feel as though I have embarked so many times before. Years of counseling – each time feeling as though I was embarking on the journey of finding myself AND each time ending counseling feeling as though I had found myself and that I had come to terms with what had happened in my past. But how often was I provided a situation where I needed to apply what I had learned and discovered to my life – and of those times, how often did I hold true to what I had learned. In so many ways I feel that I have not learned or accomplished anything, because I am revisiting this area again….but deep down in my heart, I know that I have learned and accomplished many things. I know this because so many habits have changed, desires have changed and priorities have shifted.
But, a shift has happened and I have allowed it to attack me and allowed it to hide my identity. At 24, I have empty nest syndrome. For one year I lived with a house of elementary boys and in my heart I thought them to be mine. But an opportunity presented itself for me to leave that home and change my hours – an opportunity that would allow me to spend more time with God, spend time in corporate worship, the hopes of finding a bible study, the hope of being able to be there for my friends that needed it, the hopes and wants of going back to school, of being involved in a ministry and sharing Jesus with people without having to fight with my coworkers to do so. I saw this glowing life on that other side of the fence – on that noon to 8pm shift. The minute that shift and that opportunity lost some of its glow and wasn’t everything I thought it was going to be, I seemed to have denied the glow all together and saw only dark shadows.
I prayed about it, but school – the type of schooling I wanted (counseling, social work, ministry, seminary) – was not something that was going to happen in my life. Why? Because I would be going for myself, for my own pride and it would have only feed my arrogance of the knowledge I have, God showed me that my heart was not in the right place.
The church that I attend doesn’t have small groups, and I have lost that sense of community of believers. I still miss that deepness and connection of a bible study. And with my schedule it has been difficult to be involved in a ministry or to even find a bible study via another church that is able to fit into that schedule.
My coworkers whine and gossip as if their life depends on it every day. Since I don’t live in the house with them I find it ridiculously difficult to provide them input and feedback some days. I watch them try to treat 3 year olds as if they are 5 or 6. I write to a supervisor who is so overwhelmed that she doesn’t have time to discuss my ideas with me. I watch people who really do not love children(they like them but not love them) work with children every day and my heart breaks.
My friends seem to have made themselves scarce. I know and totally understand that people move on and we are all growing up but it’s really not that difficult to return a phone call. My friends that live the furthest away are somehow the ones that I have seen the most in the last 6 months to a year. And even though I know that it is something that will happen in life – it hurts. I miss the people that understand me, that know me, that lift me up, that make me laugh, that are a break from my day to day routine and I want to spend time with them, is that really so much to ask for?
And all this going on with no children continually surrounding me, no laundry, no massive amounts of cooking, no cleaning, no grocery shopping, no decorating, no squeezing in phone calls, no conversations about random happenings, no planning trips and no paperwork. You would think that it would make it all easier to handle and deal with, but not for me – without all that going on around me it is like I have forgotten how to exist and function and be me(whoever that is).
In my identity crisis, Satan has had a field day. Trying to convince me that I switched jobs because I was weak and selfish. Attempting to get me to believe that I am nothing without the boys around, that I am not worth anything without a million things do (or even without 20 things to do), that I am not doing enough in my life or for anyone else. Trying to get me to believe that I am not beautiful or worth the time of other people. And I didn’t recognize these thoughts as Satan as early as I would have liked because, to me, they were all legitimate questions that I have had many times in my life. Not to mention that the house I left as been getting progressively worse in their behaviors and it has been breaking my heart. In the midst of my identity crisis Satan has been at work at another front in my life – my relationship with Rob. The most ridiculous arguments and heated discussions have arose simply because God is moving in Rob’s life. And due to some situations in Rob’s life Satan has tried to twist them around to make me question our relationship. But praise God for the Bailey’s and their commitment to my life- through their prayer and their time with God, they have been able to reassure me that I am in God’s will and it is ticking Satan off.
Through this all I have, at times, lost the ability to see hope and positive things. To see that God is teaching me so much every day- about how to raise children, and how to be a good friend, and how to love Him more AND how to be a woman!! That I am able to go to a church I love every Sunday – that I am able to be filled ever week. That I am attempting to find ministries that fit my schedule and that are where God wants me to be. I have had more time to spend with my own mom and dad and with the Baileys and with Rob. Just today I was able to ask my mom and dad if they would like to go to church with me on easter, and when I say ask I do mean I kind of told them it would be awesome and they should come – but I wouldn’t have been able to do that otherwise.
I know that the next few weeks are going to be trying and that there is something I need to fight inside of me –and it feels like it will be a final breaking away from old habits and old thought patterns about my self worth and how I should be treated in a relationship.
SO, if you can and are willing, please pray for me as the journey begins – well the journey has already begun so a better phrase would be as the journey continues.
PS It seemed rather fitting tonight that I saw Alice in WOnderland
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