Detour.

Sometimes... well, ok... a lot of the time, I look on my life with a mixed bag of emotions.  I am so thankful for everything that I have.  I can look behind me and see my parents and my brothers (and all those who branch off), all who love me and who make it so easy to love them in return, who have been faithful and true and steady.  I can look to my side to my husband, my children, all who are healthy and whole and full of goodness and honesty.  And I can look to my future, to all of the roads that are open, all the possibilities, all the potential.  I am surrounded by blessings.  I am entrenched in the fullness of life.

Usually, my sinful nature allows me the freedom to forget all of this and mope about the little things.  The kids didn't take naps.  I'm tired because I stayed up until midnight reading.  I'm hungry because the simplicity of having access to food not only when I needed it but when I certainly could go without led me to be a glutton of sorts and now I'm trying to correct that.  It's cold outside today.  Whine whine, sniffle sniffle.  But there are times when a great shame and humility comes pouring down on me, leaving me drenched with the stink of guilt for forgetting that I can worry about the little things because the big things aren't blocking my view. They are nicely tucked aside, pretty and lined up exactly where I expect them to be.  I don't have to worry about my husband being unfaithful, so I'll worry instead that he didn't say the exact thing I needed to hear that one time when I was feeling sorry for myself.  I don't have to worry about whether my children are going to survive the next 24 hours, so I'll worry instead about why they won't let me sit and have a warm cup coffee, making me *gasp* sit and play with them instead.  I don't have to worry about whether I will survive the next 24 hours, so instead I'll worry about how all the weight seems to be coming off my chest, and not my butt as I was hoping.


It seems, as I use the great power of hindsight to look back on my life thus far, that most of the grit and grime that I enjoy pointing back to while I hark about how I've had a hard life, too! are things that I've placed there myself, held there myself, fought to keep there myself.  It's a harsh self-analysis, but it's also giving me a freedom of sorts.  A freedom to start to pry my grip off of those things that hold me down, which is harder than one might think.  I've held on to these things for so long, it's like a skin has healed over, which I now I have to rip and tear and bite at until it lets loose.  One of the passages from C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia reminds me of this.  It comes from The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and it called out to me the very first time I read it, a full 5 years ago.  It speaks about one of the boys, Eustace, who had, quite unfortunately, turned himself into a dragon.  He started to peel off the layers of his skin in order to regain his boyhood, but after 3 layers, he was still left as a dragon.  Aslan came and told him that he would have to peel off this last layer.  

"The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart.  And when he began pulling the skin off, it hurt worse than anything I've ever felt.  The only thing that made me able to bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.  You know- if you've ever picked the scab off a sore place.  It hurts like billy-oh but it is fun to see it coming away... He peeled the beastly stuff right off - just as I thought I'd done it myself the other three times, only they hadn't hurt - and there it was, lying on the grass: only ever so much thicker, and darker, and more knobbly-looking than the others had been."

Changing things that you've grown attached to, even if they aren't healthy or good or right, is a hard painful process.  The only way that it is done effectively and efficiently, to a point where change is actually possible, is to cling to the One who has the power to cut at the heart, peeling off the layers which have grown dark and poisonous.   Because only He is strong enough not only to take it off, but also to heal the raw skin beneath.  So that's what I must do.  Step back and allow Him to rip my hands free from the poison in my life, and to heal my inevitable wounds.  Only then will I be whole, free to live my life without guilt, and with a mindset to use the blessings in my life to bless those around me.

This post is not what I had in mind when I sat down to write.  The title was "Detour" because I had intentions of writing about a certain detour that my otherwise blessed life had taken recently, which dragged me through the valleys face-down, bleeding, and otherwise incapacitated.  I'll save that post for another day.  I'll keep the title as it is though.  Because it seems to me that that is exactly what this post ended up being: a Detour.