Month: September 2017

Warning, things are messy for me.

I stare at my daughter’s tangled hair as I try to figure out the best course of action to slowly and gently undo all the the knots in her curls. Curls so gorgeous that I am constantly catching myself gazing in wonder at her perfect head, her perfect million-shades-of-spun-gold, and wondering where she got those genes.

But, the knots, oh they are so fierce and they hide beneath, where I don’t see them unless I am looking. And every time I use the bristles of my brush to coax loose an entwined strand, I hear a little gasp and a squeak, “You’re hurting me, Mama!”

I know, baby. I know the tangles hurt. And I know that it doesn’t matter how gently hands are applied to this task, it will cause pain. But if you want your hair to be free of the knots, to be healthy and free-flowing, you have to work through the pain. And if I don’t brush through them often, the snarls grow so big they overtake the beauty of your hair.

Because if you ignore the messy hair and you pretend it isn’t messy and you go through your days ignoring those continually-knottier-knots, it will be so far beyond painful for you. So I need to work at these coils and snarls. I need to undo them and comb through every section.

And so I do. I finger, separate, comb, brush, split, and work through until it’s soft once more. Glowing gold and flowing silk.

And, eventually, these tangles in my soul will follow suit.

Life is hard, right now.

And I apologize in advance, because it seems like my heart bleeds most when my bare feet are climbing a mountain- which totally makes sense now that I type it out.

Regardless, parenthood is mocking me; marriage is challenging me; my past is haunting me and all of this is starting to overwhelm me. I am so acutely aware of my frailty and I understand when David lamented about his soul being like dust. My responses to stress and conflict have not been Christlike, unfortunately, but I’m trying to figure out why and this little voice in my head is telling me it’s because I’m defective.

Trauma from my childhood has resurrected itself in the form of reality-bending anxiety and something needs to be done about it. But I am not ready to try, to journey. My energy is sapped from just doing life, where am I going to find the ability to conquer this jagged mountain?

“From Jesus,” is the Sunday school answer but that remains to be seen. Am I doubting His power and love and grace? No. Because I am aware that it will be His effort partnered with mine and I am afraid of what I will need to sacrifice for my effort.

I am terrified of the possibility of diagnoses, prescriptions, stigmas, failure, and my own altered perspective of myself. But I want peace and I want to be able to look around at my life without seeing shadows of pain and hearing voices of destruction. How did I become so easily broken? I feel like a crumpled piece of paper, no matter how smoothed out, the lines will always be there and I will never be unblemished.

There is a quote from a motivational speak that has been floating around in my soul and I can’t ignore it and it goes something like,

“Change happens when the pain of staying the same is greater than the pain of change.”

Which is where I suppose I am at. I can’t continue like this and my children don’t deserve a mother so wrought with pain that it interferes with their own upbringing. I don’t want to turn this climb into a forty-year-wandering.

Sorry, this blog doesn’t have a clean ending.

I’m an introvert, I don’t know if you knew that.

The hardest part of this way God made me is opening up and using spoken words to express, share, and acknowledge. It creates so many struggles where there needn’t be any. I feel awkward voicing my thoughts and most of the time, my thoughts aren’t even pure, distilled feelings unless I have been allowing them to steep for a while.

I hate talking- I hate the process of taking thoughts in my brain and using my lungs, tongue, and lips to create words, pushing them from vague soul stirrings to these very defined things that go out and shape my world. Words are weighty things- I love them and I struggle against them. Even with my writing, words only come out of me in a beautiful flow when my soul is in turmoil. Pain is the churn that brings my watery thoughts to more substantial feelings.

We were in church a few weeks ago when we began singing a worship song about God searching our hearts and nothing being hidden from Him. My heart and my soul sighed in complete unison as I sang those words because bless-ed relief.

We (I) usually think of those part of our souls we want to keep hidden as something of which we are ashamed- things we don’t want the light to touch, to be seen or talked about. We try to hide from God because it’s easier- but for me, that day, I knew it meant less struggle, less talking, less thoughts-forming-into-words energy I would have to expend.

Because God sees me. Even the hidden, the buried deep, the still-not-steeped. And that means I don’t have to do anything to be known by Him. He knows me. I can find rest in His omniscience.

It’s hard for me to explain this kind of rest- and it’s something I’ve never understood or experienced before. Perhaps, if you’re an introvert with fewer words like me, you’ll understand the peace that overtook me when I felt Father say, “Be still. I know it all.”

The struggle has ceased. The agonizing over proper words and true expression and honest discourse- it has been indefinitely paused.

And I can rest and just be.