Time marches on…

Time marches on….

Time has been marching on.  It’s hard to believe it’s been over 7 months since my life got turned completely upside down.  There have been so many emotions, so many shifts, so many transitions.  One of the stranger things has been the more recent shift of feeling things at a deeper level now.  I think as the shock has worn off it’s opened the pathway to truly feel the enormity of my experiences.  At the beginning you just blindly placed one foot in front of the other.  You tried to be everything you could, to be strong, to be what your kids needed, to try to be what you best thought the situation demanded for yourself and your spouse.  But if allowed to, time has a way of eroding every wall and defense that was erected to try to merely protect yourself.

Today I had therapy and it was tough and good at the same time.  It’s so very good to have one to keep you honest and who is just for you, rooting for you, and there to help when you try to navigate all the paths before you.  Today we pinpointed several things, things that hurt but things that were at the heart of me.  One for me was misappropriated blame.  When you go through something like this it is so very difficult not to attribute blame to yourself, to take that on and get wrecked trying to figure out what was wrong with you, why rejection came, why you weren’t good enough to be loved anymore.  See that’s the thing, that’s the trap…we are such broken people.  We can so easily fall into trying to better ourselves to make us so lovable that we never experience this hurt and pain again.  We want, I want, that guarantee that this will never ever ever ever happen again. So you try to figure out the magic recipe that’ll make you irresistible and fix whatever you deem to be lacking in yourself.  But that’s not the way life works, it’s not the way love works.  You have to risk the utter destruction to truly gain access to an unfathomable love.  You have to be entirely and completely vulnerable to truly love.  You open yourself up to a world of pain to experience a world of love.  And I’ll let you in on a side secret…that’s absolutely what the incarnation was.  God becoming human was God’s wrecking of himself, his opening himself up to be completely vulnerable, wholly fragile, and perfect love was found through that act. He also opened himself up to utter rejection, despair, betrayal, and heartache…and found them all.  Second side secret…the truest thing about you is that you are beloved by God completely and utterly just like you are, unable to add one thing to make you more lovable than he already sees you.  And that’s a truly terrifying place, to allow and let yourself be loved just for being you, to allow yourself to be loved for nothing.

Back to today.  My therapist Adam forces me to name my emotions.  To mine them at a deeper level than just the surface and for that I am grateful.  Today he made me go to a place I was trying to avoid.  Not even really sure why but it felt good to name it today, to give utterance to my feeling.  It took me a while to get here and to not keep continually brushing it all aside.  I wasn’t even sure it was really an emotion but he asked me to truly name the feeling and the balloon within me popped and I said it…devastation.  Complete and full and utter devastation. Like a tornado has come through and just wiped the entire house off its foundation. Destruction.

And you know what,  it’s okay.  Because I loved, maybe not perfectly, but when you love you open yourself up to devastation. At times in this you can get side tracked with all the questions, all the confusion, all the doubts, that you begin to wonder if you were ever in love at all because it’s all just disappeared, seemingly in an instant. But the devastation reminds me, the reality of that pain, of that wound, it is a beacon of the truth, that you gave yourself to love. You may have lost, but you put yourself out there and you allowed yourself to love imperfectly even in all your brokenness and with all your baggage.  The devastation and the pain is one of the badges that reminds you that you tried to love and that loving another human is a dangerous endeavor, fraught with the highest of highs and lowest of lows.  And you realize that to love again forces you to come to terms with that, the reality that you have to be vulnerable and put your heart out there if you want to truly and fully love.  So there you have it, devastation.  That’s my word of the day.  It feels good to begin to fully experience it. Because I know that if I go fully through this, fully feel this, I’ll be better on the other side.  It’ll take some time for sure, but I’m sure one day I’ll risk it all again, even more deeply and fully than before.