It’s easier to hang on to the past and look to the future than to look at where I am today. Honestly, today hurts. Today didn’t go as planned and it hasn’t for the last ten years. Honestly, I feel robbed. I feel robbed of confidence I am only now beginning to find. I’m angry I did not gain freedom to fail beautifully, earlier. I wish I had learned earlier to not allow failure to define me as a person.
Looking at today hurts, because it’s not where I want to be and it’s going to be all up hill to get where I want to go. Today is painful, today feels like I’m going to need more wine, sleep or both. Yet, those are not really what I need. It’s what I want to escape the pain, but escaping the pain is partly how I got where I am.
Today the waves of yesterday and the waves of not where I want to be are crashing into me and I can do nothing, but let them. I’m tired, tired of standing, tired of trying…tired.
I’m stomping like my feet like my little Timmy does when he is angry. I am angry and hurt at relationships that died. Angry and hurt how life hasn’t turned out. I sit in the ashes, I sit in the waves and I allow them to wash over me. I want to feel them full force. I want to be furious and I want my agony to pour from my soul. I want to hurt like hell and the allow hell to pass away and it will, because I want to rise from the ashes. I want to rise as only Christ can bring anything back from the dead. I want to rise and live!
I want to stand in victory, because I am my beloved’s and he is mine. The beloved is not Mark, my kids or this world, my beloved is Christ alone, the rock on which I stand.
I want to die to my flesh so my spirit can rise and be healed. I want to stand in testimony, I want my tattoo and scars to bare the hell my body and my flesh have gone through. Both are in the process of healing, both to me are beautiful.
I’m not where I thought I would be almost eleven years later, but I am exactly where God knew I would be. I have never been far from him, this thought is both comforting and angering at the same time. I need to feel both emotions.
Feel, I am learning to feel and it is wonderful and awful at the same time. I have always been able to feel the pain of others. I absorb it like a sponge and it has always been painful. I didn’t like it and ran the opposite direction.
Today I am done running. Partly because I am too tired and partly because I want true healing, not a drug to numb the pain. Running has been my drug and I don’t want to run anymore. I will run full force into the pain, I will feel it and live to tell about it..
It is in the feeling and the living when I truly find freedom to live. I am curled up on my Abba’s lap and sobbing. I’m asking him how I got to where I am and could he please speed up the process to allow me to get to the other side. What I am really asking him is can I escape the pain and the discomfort. The answer is usually, no. He loves me too much to let me skip the pain. It is in the pain when true relationship with the father happens and it is in those moments when I am the closets to him.
I am learning to live in today. To accept where I am, but with the knowledge I am able to do something with where I am. I do not have to stay here and I won’t. I will sit for a while and rest beside my canoe. I will eat a bit of lunch and then sit down in my canoe, grab my paddle, and begin exploring the waters right here in front of me.
There will be times I navigate alone, other times various people will get in and out of my canoe, sometimes I’ll throw someone out or switch canoes all together if they don’t get out. Regardless, Christ in me and through me will navigate me through the waters and the portages. Together, my savior and I paddle on.