STRUGGLES

Hello!!

I spent the last few days away from my blog for a reason. Namely, because I spent the last few days trying to find my place with God again. I am still not certain I have, but after meeting with my best friend Brett tonight, I felt renewed. Nothing profound happened. It was just the good feeling of being around the brother in Christ who knows me best.

Brett just seems to know what to say, and if I asked if he knew he was doing it, he’d definitely say no. God truly does work in strange ways. There is another friend who just knows what to say, too, but I won’t give her name here. She knows who she is, and she just seems to always say what I need to hear.

Do you have anyone you can count on like that? Do you have fellow believers you meet with regularly who just know what to say, even if it isn’t much? I have to say, I am so thankful for these people, and I know I don’t deserve it. I know I have opened up on this blog before, so if you are new here, check out some of the previous blogs recently. I am not going set a link here for them, because I am running out of time tonight to say what I came here to say. But if you read this blog regularly, then you already know some of my past.

I am struggling right now with God. I don’t want to, I just am. I feel renewed, yet there is this fear in me that this is only temporary. I’m struggling with faith. I’m not struggling with being real. I’m just struggling. It is not depression, or anger, or lack of joy. It is just struggling. Maybe I am trying to hold onto a part of me that God will have. Maybe I am fearful of what certain signs I have been seeing in my life mean. If I knew, I wouldn’t be struggling.

I haven’t spent as much time praying as I usually do, and that bothers me. I feel very isolated. Not alone, but very removed from things right now. Some people would call this a desert experience. I don’t think I’d call it that. Maybe a good way to describe it would be to say it is a time I feel detached from the world. Yes, maybe that is a good thing in some ways. But, the way this feels, it doesn’t feel good.

On the flip side, I have been getting some strange thoughts lately, like today, watching my daughter interact with her friends. She was responding to something, and I for a moment thought I was inside of her head, reading her thoughts as she formed her words. Now to be inside of her head is utter nonsense. I wasn’t actually inside. But I was conscious of a thought process that works so quickly in each of us, that we can many times reply almost without a pause to questions just asked. That amazed me.

Then, I realized something. We all, as we think of what to say, go through several different avenues of thought. The first might be, “I have to respond in a certain way, because that’s how these people know me”. The second thought could be a recognition thought, such as, “Was that a derogatory comment?”. Then, we switch into tone of voice in our answer, as well as exact words, exact pitch, exact order of expression, and on and on and on. All these thoughts take place both before, and as we reply. And, everyone goes through this. I am not alone in my thinking, or in my feelings. Everyone feels the same things, albeit maybe for different reasons. But many of the things that would hurt me, would hurt my daughter. And, I begin to see how instead of loving my neighbor, I can now love them as myself, as if they were me.

We may all be different, but the thoughts and hurts are the same. When I look at my daughter, it can be hard now to say something, because I am very aware that inside of her is this entire thought process going on, along with an emotional process. Am I causing pain by the tone of my voice, by what I say, by how I bring it to her attention? Am I hindering her, or creating scars, or wounding deeply? She is my daughter, and I believe to die for her would be easy. But to live for her as Jesus would have done, how easy is that?

I have learned several things in this struggle. I am not as surrendered as I thought I was, and even less than most people think I am. I do not have faith even as small as a mustard seed. And, although I thought I knew what it meant to love my neighbor as myself, I am learning it goes much deeper than just being nice on the surface, or just acting kind. It goes beyond just my daughter, to every single soul I meet, this process of thought and emotion.

I wonder, would we do the things we do if immediately, we could be inside of the person’s head we did it to? Would we, if we could feel the tearing of the heart, or the beginnings of the stomach rumbling in anxiety? I wonder………………..