Month: October 2009

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Some wonderful advice

God bless Penelope at Penelope’s Oasis for sharing this post a couple weeks ago.

“Don’t be afraid to take a wrecking ball to your life in order to redesign it” is bold advice, but completely fitting and even, sometimes, necessary.

Middle age and personal disappointments provide a wonderful impetus for evaluating my life. Having just turned 52 this past week, I’ve been doing a lot of reflecting, myself. Am I doing what I want to do? What I value? Where do my daydreams take me? What do I want to be when I grow up?

There’s an image that keeps coming to me – I’m looking out the window across a green lawn, shaded with large trees, and looking at an expanse of water – a Sound, perhaps, if not the ocean. Where is it? I feel as if I’ve seen it before, perhaps on my way to Ocracoke, but I’ve never been inside a house that overlooks so much water.

What in-between steps can I be taking to make my dreams a reality? If I need something pretty to look out at while I work, what can I do on my own to give myself a pretty view?

I’ve taken the wrecking ball to one dimension of my life – one that meant a great deal to me, meant more than I can tell anyone, but that simply had to be left. It doesn’t hurt as badly as one might think. Oh, yes, it’s scary, and there’s a bit of grieving that goes along with it… but there are compensatory graces: I know I made the right and responsible and honorable choice, and I know this “amputation” will allow me to draw closer to what I really want to achieve during the time God has given me in this life – and, consequently, to what I want in the life of the World to come.

There’s no virtue in being a victim, having one’s life scripted by people who want only their own good, their own convenience and pleasure. God gives us a great deal of free choice and the opportunity to make good each and every day.

Be bold. Be adventurous. No one else can do it for us.

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noodling – nothing important, just Thankful

I can’t go into details, because this story involves someone else – a couple of somebody elses, actually – and I don’t intend to cause them embarrassment.

Let’s just begin by saying I am highly intuitive. Some people might call me psychic, although that’s not a term I care for at all. Sometimes I just know things – things I haven’t seen, or been told, or read… I just know them.

For several weeks I had deep unhappy forebodings about a situation. I felt weighed down by what I perceived was happening. I saw what I thought was the worst possible thing that could happen, the one thing I didn’t think I could bear, and I begged God to protect me from having to face that one thing I thought I could never bear.

Then this week I learned that the thing I dreaded has happened, and the thing I thought I could not bear, I have to bear. There isn’t any choice. As in my favorite passage from Rosamunde Pilcher, below, there isn’t any way not to bear it, except to stop the world and get off, and there is no practical way to accomplish that.

The remarkable thing is that, now it has happened, it isn’t so unbearable as I thought I would be. Once the initial blows had landed – and they felt rather as if I’d been kicked in the solar plexus; when I thought it couldn’t get worse, a new blow landed that was worse than the ones before – I took my bearings and discovered that I can bear this loss after all. Not only that, but I can bear not getting the answers and the resolution that might make sense of the tragedy.

Detachment won’t be easy – it goes against my basic nature – but it is do-able, I can see that clearly now.

God’s hands are large enough to hold the individuals involved – and tender enough to soothe the aches and sorrows of a broken heart and grieved soul.