I have been reading and reading and reading another blog today and her transparency and candor are graceful and her writing is gorgeous. She tells her story of redemption with marked poignancy and forms words into perfect metaphors to make it all so real and graspable.
To be honest, it's left me with a desire to be a little more transparent with some things in my own life as well. The truth is, I'm broken. Very broken. Sometimes (maybe too often?) I try to hide it and cover it up with things to make me appear not so broken. But I know the truth and I am beginning to realize that covering it up only breaks my pieces into smaller bits until soon I will be nothing but a soft heap of fine sand.
This is where I am these days.
Why do I dare to make the vital and life-sucking mistake of constantly comparing myself to other people that I think appear to have it all together, or more together than I do? Why do I do that? Take my sister Traci for instance. I love her. I love her husband and all 6 of her soon to be 7 kids. I watch her in her life and think to myself, Man, why does she have it so together and I don't? How is it she goes through life seemingly not struggling with anything? How is it she has everything and I struggle to make ends meet? And I have a friend, Amy, that I admire greatly, for her writing abilities, for her eye for capturing a great photograph, for her faith, for her beauty and brokenness and boldness. But I can't just leave it at admiring her. I feel this compulsion toward feeling "less-than" simply because I'm not her. I want her to validate me as if she's the one from whom I receive my worth. And honestly, we aren't even close. We were a lot closer 5 years ago or so and I'm not real sure what happened but something changed. Then there's the subject of my car. It's ugly. It's old. Not everything works properly. My door handle is a different color than the rest of it and there's a dent in the passenger side door. And I care entirely too much about those things. I sometimes find myself ashamedly parking away from other people if I'm meeting friends somewhere in hopes they won't see it. I'm embarassed by it even though I know, as Tyler Durden said in Fight Club, "You are not the car you drive and you are not the contents of your wallet." And all of a sudden I'm back to trying to find something to fill whatever it is I feel I'm lacking. All along I know it's a God-shaped hole, not a shirt shaped hole or a cd shaped hole or a lunch shaped hole.
That's another thing. Sometimes I find myself wanting, nay needing, to prove to others, even if I'm alone, that I have money, or that I can go out to eat or get a decaf javanilla shake, even though I really can't. And so I perpetuate the cycle and it never ends. It seems like the less money I have the more I spend for some reason. Actually, it's exactly that: the less I have, the more I feel I have to prove to others and maybe even to myself. I get a little money and I find all kinds of reasons, real or not, to justify spending it. I hate that part of me. It's ugly like a cancer that I want removed, cut out of me. I've had periods in my life when I was responsible and was able to save money instead of spending it but these days I'm struggling. Being unemployed I'm sure has a lot to do with it but so do my own poor choices and it pains me admitting that. We all have affairs, and mine repeatedly seems to be with money.
Sure, I have days when I am happily just me and rest in the knowledge that I am who God says I am and that he gave me my worth. But that's not always. And I have a pretty wonderful life, seriously, I know it could be a lot worse and I don't have to go very far to find people hurting more than I am. But I just feel I should be more thankful for it, more at rest. The book Captivating talks about a woman's heart and says that a truly beautiful heart is one that isn't striving but is just at rest with God and who she is, who he created her to be (should be required reading for every woman/girl). And there's I Peter Chapter 3 that says this: "Your beauty should not come from outward adornment, such as braided hair and the wearing of gold jewelry and fine clothes. Instead, it should be that of your inner self, the unfading beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which is of great worth in God's sight. For this is the way the holy women of the past who put their hope in God used to make themselves beautiful." I have that verse taped up in a couple of places but the truth of it still has yet to sink in to the very depths of my heart.
I know the roots of most of these things, if not all. I have had 32 years of moments when my value and worth were stripped from me or left in piles of broken china on the kitchen floor. That's not the point here. The point here is just to have it out, out into the light because darkness and Light cannot coexist. It's physically impossible. Shame and grace cannot occupy the same space. I hope to be a little more candid here on my blog in the future. I'm not saying I haven't been honest or transparent before now, but I'm only saying that I hope to be more so. I know a few weeks ago I posted about Donald Miller and his "lifeboat theory" that we all act as if we're on a lifeboat with 10 other people, but there's only room for 10 total, so one of us has to go and so we all try to prove that we should be one who stays. It resonated deep within me and for a while it was quite effective at allowing me to be at rest with who I am. But here the last few days, I have somehow, through a variety of circumstances, gotten away from that and let the lie creep back in that I have something to prove to others so that they'll let me remain in the boat. As if they get to decide. I'm tired of living that way. It's exhausting. So I'm committing myself to bringing things out into the light here in the hopes that it will help me be more accountable for my thoughts and actions. If I know I've committed to posting about it maybe it will help change my behavior / thougths?
I feel compelled to add, I know the Truth. I know from where my self-worth comes. I also know that it's the broken things that find redemption. Beauty out of ashes. This is the hope to which I cling.
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