Christine and the terrible, horrible, no good very bad day

Well today has already been a terrible day. I'm exaggerating of course, but it feels terrible. I dislike venting in a blog post but Dan is busy loading trailers up North and I need somewhere to put this so that I can continue on with my day.

I was awake again before 4 this morning and didn't fall back asleep for at least an hour. It doesn't sound like very long, but my quality of sleep is very poor after being awake in the middle of the night. This has been happening regularly over the past few weeks and I'm annoyed because I have little energy to get through the day as it is. I think last night I was lying awake thinking about worship and trying to shuffle things around in March while Dan and I are away. In any case, I'm ready for Dan to be home so I can feel safe and get some rest.

Then on the way to work I almost got in an accident (it wasn't my fault.) A van pulled out in front of me from a parking spot and proceeded to slowly turn right on a green light. While I was going around him, a truck turned right in front of me (he was obviously in a big hurry as there were several cars already in the intersection in his way). Meanwhile, still turning, the van stopped for no apparent reason, the truck slammed on its brakes with its backend still in the intersection, and I almost ran right into it. So now I couldn't breathe.

Carry on to the post office where I pick up mail for work and I couldn't find parking because the staff park in the customer parking spaces. Good customer service people.

Then I get to work and I have an email from a 'co-worker' saying that "If you plan on taking courses or advancing to a higher position in accounting make sure items add up." Granted, having items add up is a big deal in accounting. It was my fault because I was rushed last week, and I've made the mistake before when I've been rushed. So I kept telling myself that it actually was my mistake and I can't really feel bad when this person is telling the truth. But still, something about the way this person worded it made me feel really bad. Most of the reasons it made me feel bad are not appropriate to put in a blog post until I can deal with them directly but one of the main reasons is that I'm absolutely starving for someone to come alongside me and help me to grow my accounting skills. I'd love to be in a position where I could be mentored by someone, where I could do meaningful work and where I could advance to a higher position in accounting. But the reality is that the people who can teach me are too busy to do it, so when I hear a comment like that it does not feel constructive, it feels like this person is making a judgment on my skills.

Anyway, it would be great if today could be over already. Does anyone know how to do that?

I Love Lucy?

Over 5 years ago, my friend told me about this new thing called 'facebook.' I don't remember what she said, but I wasn't interested at first. In general I don't tend to do things that a lot of people do. I think this is true, but I could have a warped perception of my life. I don't really use my cell phone except to text with Dan when he's away, save myself when the car battery dies and make plans. I can't use the internet on my phone. I like the idea of an Ipad but I'm not convinced that I'd use it for all it's worth. I can't imagine using Twitter. We don't have cable. So I can't remember why I decided to join facebook, but apparently it got out of hand. It's now been about a week and a half since the big sacrifice and here's what I've noticed so far:

• I don't know the email addresses or phone numbers of my closest friends.
  
• One of the first things I wonder in the morning is what has happened on facebook since yesterday.
  
• My most frequent thoughts during the day are about checking facebook.
  
• I'm very aware of how much free time I have in my day.
  
• I almost dread going home after work because I'm alone and I don't always have plans to be with people.
  
• When I'm with people, I feel deeply grateful for their presence and very aware of my community of friends.
  
• I think more about writing, and I write more.
  
• I've done more housework.
  
• I remember things that have happened in my life and I wish that I could see my extended family more.
  
• I read more.
  
• I have more questions about God and faith and I'm not too busy to ask them.
  
• I realize how much I love being around Dan, even when we're not talking.
  
• I listen to music more (right now Paul McCartney is singing about Joner in the whale and Noer in the ark.)
  

I found this quote somewhere a few days ago. I love Frederick Buechner. I've been thinking a lot lately about why I believe what I believe. I think about it because I know people who don't believe it, I know people who believe it but don't live it, and I know people who live it. Anyway, I'm not a scholar and the only time I can articulate the reasons why I follow Jesus is when I`m at home thinking about things for myself. But a major reason that I`ve been thinking about what I believe is because I get really annoyed when I read about certain groups of people saying that Christians have no reasoning skills or that we make up God to make ourselves feel better or that we blindly believe everything we hear. I feel offended by this even if it`s never meant to be an attack on a specific person. Obviously I don`t think it`s true for me, so if it`s not true for me then it`s not a characteristic of being a Christian. The point being that I doubt a lot and I ask a lot of questions and I don`t really expect to ever have an air-tight fool-proof case for why I believe what I believe. So for my journey I think it`s more important that I have good reasons for believing what I believe, reasons that make sense based on my experience of life and what I discover when I ask questions. I think I`ll start collecting the reasons why I believe, although the background material for some have already been forgotten or lost.

"If you tell me Christian commitment is a kind of thing that has happened to you once and for all like some kind of spiritual plastic surgery, I say you're either pulling the wool over your own eyes or trying to pull it over mine. Every morning you should wake up in your bed and ask yourself: "Can I believe it all again today?" No, better still, don't ask it till after you've read The New York Times, till after you've studied that daily record of the world's brokenness and corruption, which should always stand side by side with your Bible. Then ask yourself if you can believe in the Gospel of Jesus Christ again for that particular day. If your answer's always Yes, then you probably don't know what believing means. At least five times out of ten the answer should be No because the No is as important as the Yes, maybe more so. The No is what proves you're human in case you should ever doubt it. And then if some morning the answer happens to be really Yes, it should be a Yes that's choked with confession and tears and. . . great laughter."

Every night before bed I watch at least one episode of I Love Lucy. I`m nearing the end of the show now for the 5th time or so and I have to say that it`s really starting to bother me. The major reason is because in the earlier episodes, Lucy does some really hilarious things that make me laugh out loud; in the last shows, especially when they started doing one hour shows with more celebrities, the show is summed up by Lucy wanting to do something crazy, Ricky saying no, and Lucy whining, crying or threatening Ricky until she gets her way. Lucy always wants to spend money and Ricky can`t afford it. Blah blah blah. Most of the funny situations have been replaced with a weird marital tension and parent-child dynamic. I`m probably more sensitive to this because I know that at the time their marriage was on the verge of breaking up and they weren`t able to hide it completely. I`ve also noticed that for a show made in the 50s, they only once or twice say the word `prayer` and they are not shy about making jokes about separation and divorce. Still, I am attached to the heart of the show for its chemistry and creativity. I just have to make sure not to watch it if I'm irritable or exhausted.

This is a blog that my cousin posted about orphans in our country http:/thelogo.blogspot.com/2012/03/children-are-waiting.html. Are we hypocrites? Dan and I both sponsor children but it suddenly doesn't feel like enough.

(John Denver is singing Sunshine on my Shoulders)

I love him

Tonight while I was driving home through the snow I got to thinking about a particular night a couple of years ago when Dan and I still lived in Ontario.

We used to have more serious fights when we lived in Ontario. It may have been because we were getting used to being married, although I don't ever remember having to adjust much to Dan's daily routine or weird habits or quirks. Truthfully, he's had to do more adjusting than I have
because I'm much more random and messy. I don't think we've ever had a screaming match, and although I know that I've said things I regret, even from the beginning we were fairly good at actually discussing the problem instead of getting into fights about nothing. My biggest adjustment to being married was learning to be vulnerable. Dan has always been a very trustworthy person, but I had trouble letting myself trust him with my heart. Funny I know, when you've already married a person. I also struggled a lot with learning to be my own person and living out from under anyone's expectations of me or obligations on my time and behaviour. I had a lot of growing pains that year.

I remember that I used to be a lot harder on Dan and I got angry a lot more than I felt sad. I said really insensitive things and I was hard-hearted and unforgiving. I'm pretty sure that two of the biggest disagreements we've had have been my fault because I pushed him until he couldn't take it anymore. This particular night I had pushed him too far and he had to leave the house to calm down. Of course I have no idea what I was so upset about. Dan doesn't get angry easily and even when he does, he handles it really well. When he left, I was so afraid that I had lost him forever and I was so worried that if he came back that there would be hours or days of awkward silences and forced conversation.

When he came through the door, he was holding a Jones soda and a chocolate bar. He said that he thought I could use something to make myself feel better. I melted then. Dan helped me to be more vulnerable because even when I pushed him too far, he always made me feel and loved. Loved without deserving one bit of it.

That reminds me of another time before we were even dating when he showed up at my door with a Booster juice and chunky monkey ice cream because I'd had a bad day. It's hard to believe that it took me so long to realize how amazing he is, but now that I know I'm not letting him go.

Love never gives up.
Love cares more for others than for self.
Love doesn't want what it doesn't have.
Love doesn't strut,
Doesn't have a swelled head,
Doesn't force itself on others,
Isn't always "me first,"
Doesn't fly off the handle,
Doesn't keep score of the sins of others,
Doesn't revel when others grovel,
Takes pleasure in the flowering of truth,
Puts up with anything,
Trusts God always,
Always looks for the best,
Never looks back,
But keeps going to the end.

Close the facebook

On Ash Wednesday I took a break from Facebook for the season of Lent. My normal routine is to get out of bed, check facebook, wash my hair, make breakfast, browse facebook while I eat breakfast, get dressed, and leave for work. This Wed morning I felt lost, had too much time and noticed how quiet the house felt. The first thing that broke the quiet was the sound of our neighbour yelling at her kids outside. She started yelling while I was outside starting our car (at which point I wondered why she wasn't more embarrassed to be yelling at her kids in the company of a stranger) and she continued to yell while I finished drying my hair. You'd think that I'd feel more pious because I'd just made a huge sacrifice for Lent, but all I could do was run through a scenario in my head where I called Social Services and they came and saved the kids from humiliation and severe self-esteem issues. All the while, I was wishing that I could go on facebook and post my thoughts for all my friends to see. Our neighbour yells at her kids a lot (her husband is around somewhere but I don't see him a lot and when I do see him, he is docile and useless.) When I tell people about the yelling, they sometimes respond by saying that having kids is difficult and you find yourself yelling when you don't mean to, or maybe that I just happen to see our neighbour on the few occasions where she's yelling at her kids. No, I've never heard a kind word from her. No, accidental yelling does not include berating your kid and using the F-word. I don't understand why some people choose to have children if they have no intention of making any effort to deal with their frustration over being parents. When you hear someone yelling like that, you can't help but think that they feel like their kids have been forced on them as an unwanted burden. I have no patience for parents who treat their kids in such a terrible way. I feel frustrated and helpless when I see kids that have to grow up being treated so terribly (let me be clear that I am referring to extreme cases of anger/yelling/language.) I don't understand why there's nothing that I can do if they're not being physically or sexually abused or neglected. The kid next door, and probably his little sister too, will grow up feeling worthless; he will feel the need to be perfect. He won't be able to admit that he's wrong and he won't be able to form healthy relationships. He will spend most of his adult life (if he makes it through his teenage years) feeling like he's broken and that he was abused by and taken advantage of by the two people who were supposed to protect him. He will feel like he is at fault for being born and ruining his parents' lives, when he had absolutely no say in the matter. I wish that emotional abuse was taken seriously enough early on so that kids could be saved before they started to withdraw or act out or bring guns to school. I wish that someone would show up at our neighbours' door and take their kids away until they could prove that they were capable and willing to deal with their own problems and then do what was best for their kids.

 

I have suspected for a while that my energy has been misplaced. I really love video games and good tv shows and being at home with Dan. I love being on facebook because I can see what's happening in the world even when I'm too tired to go out, or feeling too introverted to want to call anyone. But I only have so much energy to go around and I can tell that thinking of others and giving my time is more of an effort than a natural outpouring. I do want to live my life that way, but I also like the life that we've been living. Dan is surprised by how much I miss facebook because even he didn't know how much I relied on it for connection and entertainment. I think that certain things, if given the chance, can override our balance and make us think that we can't live without them. They're not always all that harmful, but they trick you into thinking that other worthwhile things will take too much time away. Video games, tv shows and facebook are like that for me. I love them, but I let them have too much of my time. When we lived in Ontario there was a really sad story in the news about a boy who ran away from home because his parents had taken away his x-box. Eventually it came out that playing online, he had gotten to be quite well known for his skill and that he spent most of his days in his room. He was missing for quite a while and he was eventually found in a field, having died from chest injuries from falling out of a tree in the middle of the night. I wonder, if he'd had the chance to know his future, whether he would have thought that his x-box was important enough to die for. Anyway, without facebook I have so much time that I hardly know what to do with myself.

 

I think stories about celebrities are generally annoying, but every time I read one I always find myself thinking that we're not meant to be containers. Celebrities are the focus of too many people; we obsess over their grocery shopping habits, we give them too much credit for being beautiful or talented (if you want to see real talent, watch some I Love Lucy celebrity episodes) and we pour more attention on them than they have rightly earned. And a good number of them fall apart. By being a container I mean that we're not really meant to have things poured into us without some sort of outpouring as well. People, even celebrities, are not made to handle this overload. To be fair, these thoughts come about because I have been a one-way street. I generally think more about myself than others, I prefer tv shows to interaction with people, I let being tired keep me from all sorts of things and I have a hard time giving this stuff up for something more meaningful. As a result I've been depressed and I feel like I'm half dead. I feel like my life has no Life in it. I think we are the most alive when we let things go right through us. Things come in, things go out. We receive kindness, we show kindness; we are given rest, we give someone else the chance to rest; we are loved, we love others. This is one reason that I believe in God, because He was the first to show us that this is how life should be, and I discover all the time that it's actually true.

 

Just before I left facebook, someone posted that they didn't understand why people would give up facebook for Lent because you're basically just giving up friends and family. Someone else commented that instead of depriving themselves of something, they choose to replace something with another thing that is more meaningful or healthy. I am sensitive to what other people think and say, and I really wanted to defend myself more than I did, but I couldn't because I'm not allowed on facebook. But it's been on my mind for two days now and I guess not everyone understands what it's about. I made the choice because instead of connecting me to friends and family, it disconnected me from my sense of worth. Instead of being something meaningful, it stole all of my time from anything more life-giving. So not everyone gets it, but for me it was the absolutely right choice and I did it for the right reasons: because God feels distant and my heart is half dead and no amount of facebook validation in the world is worth that.

 

PS. In place of facebook time, I'm resuming cello lessons. Woot!

 

Saved by the book

I've been in a spiritual slump that has lasted all summer. I don't know exactly what brought it on (I have some ideas) but it has been a long period of cynicism, doubt, hardness, defensiveness. Beth sent me The Holy Longing (Ronald Rolheiser) as a birthday gift and reading it may be the start of a breakthrough. I said to Dan the other day that I'm glad that God is gracious because when I'm stubborn He reaches me through books even though the ideal would be for me to go directly to Him.

"Spirituality is not something on the fringes, an option for those with a particular bent. None of us has a choice. Everyone has to have a spirituality and everyone does have one, either a life-giving one or a destructive one. No one has the luxury of choosing here because all of us are precisely fired into life with a certain madness that comes from the gods and we have to do something with that. We do not wake up in this world calm and serence, having the luxury of choosing to act or not to act. We wake up crying, on fire with desire, with madness. What we do with that madness is our spiritualtiy.

Hence, spirituality is not about serenely picking or rationally choosing certain spiritual activities like going to church, praying or meditating, reading spiritual books, or setting off on some explicit spiritual quest. It is far more basic than that. Long before we do anything explicitly religious at all, we have to do something about the fire that burns within us. What we do with that fire, how we channel it, is our spirituality. Thus, we all have a spirituality whether we want one or not, whether we are religious or not. Spirituality is more about whether or not we can sleep at night than about whether or not we got to church. It is about being integrated or falling apart, about being within community or being lonely, about being in harmony with Mother Earth or being alienated from her. Irrespective of whether or not we let ourselves be consciously shaped by any explicit religious idea, we act in ways that leave us either healthy or unhealthy, loving or bitter. What shapes our actions is our spirituality."

"Teilhard de Chardin once said that God speaks to every element in the language it can understand. Thus, God lures hydrogen through its attraction to oxygen. God draws everything else, including each of us, in the same way. There is, in the end, one force, one spirit, that works in all of the universe. The chemicals in our hands and those in our brains were forged in the same furnace that forged the stars. The same spirit that drives oxygen to unite with hydrogen makes a baby cry when it is hungry, sends the adolescent out in hormonal restlessness, and calls Mother Teresa to church to pray. There is a discontent, another word for soul and spirit, in all things and what those things, or persons, do with that discontent is their spirituality."

Here

God, suddenly, is no longer 'somewhere out there' as a Being that I need to understand or please, nor is He something that I need to wrap my mind around or search the world for. No, He is right here where my heart is too. He is in this home that I make for my husband, He is in the care that I have for my dying plant(s), He is in the beauty of the paint that I spread on canvas. Here too is He when my pain spills over into hurtful words and here again in the forgiving arms of my beloved husband. Here He is, so close that I cannot separate His heart from mine, and it is in all of these small everyday things where we will become friends, where I will come to know Him.

8 Days a week, I love you

I had intended to write much more often than I have over these past 9 months. I’ve come close to writing quite few times but because I’m not a trained writer, I write more from the heart than from the head. It’s a big time commitment and I need to feel drawn to write. On a more practical side, I’m just happy to have made it this far with all the things I have to take care of, so writing isn’t always high on the list. I wish that I could channel thoughts into my blog though because I’m always formulating in my mind.

Today is 6 days away from Dan being home. I don’t really even remember believing that we’d ever get this close to the end. Although the end is near in days, today it feels like forever. The base is in communication lockdown, something that I don’t think has happened even once since the beginning, unless my memory is wrong. I don’t fully understand what has to happen for a lockdown to occur but I’m pretty sure that it’s either a serious threat of some kind or something very important happening that cannot be compromised. Dan was able to text me and let me know but I am anxious just the same. I am not familiar enough with their environment to know whether he is in real danger or not. I’m very shaky at the thought of something happening so close to the end. I just want him to be able to get out and begin his way home.

The expectation so close to the end is that we’re both terribly excited. We are of course, but it’s easy to forget that it’s complicated. We have developed a routine both in our separate lives and in our relating to each other that has been disturbed with the approaching end. Dan has been extremely busy with added work since the first group left and I’ve just been trying to hang on until it’s all over. Our communication has been challenging at times and today, nonexistent. It’s very uncomfortable. I’m not sleeping well anymore because I feel unsettled and restless from excitement and nervousness. I ache for time to move faster so I’m not peaceful or in the moment. I’m very emotional and am close to crying whenever I think of seeing Dan’s face. I’m sure that this will only get worse over the course of the week.

I am very aware of the stress that I’ve been carrying. My spirit, heart, mind and body all feel very tired. Stress is one of those things that can be low-level for so long that you forget it’s there. I think maybe because I’m starting to relax a little, I’m realizing how much I’ve been carrying on my own. I can’t even imagine how exhausted I’m going to feel next weekend when I can fully let go and begin to rest. I’m pretty sure that the stress has been taking its toll on my body for a while now because I’ve been sick almost consistently since Christmas and on Friday I just found out that I have shingles. From what I understand, shingles is something you get when your immune system is compromised so either I have something that is weakening my immune system, or I’m incredibly tired and stressed; probably both are true.

I will reserve sharing about Dan’s experience until I am able to hear it directly from him. His experience is nothing that I can even imagine and I feel like it would do a great disservice to his story to try and describe something that is so foreign to me and so real to him.

I was reminded this week of just how lonely this life can be. I say this not with self-pity, although I have plenty of it, but from a place of observation. On Wed I went to the reintegration briefing held by the family resource centre for spouses and families of returning military members. I was the only spouse there who didn’t have kids so I felt out of place enough. I’m no stranger to the feeling of being not as strong or capable as other wives who have one or several kids. Afterwards, one of the wives said “I don’t mean to belittle your experience or anything, but I really think that it’s easier to handle when you don’t have kids.” So I asked myself – why do you feel like it’s so tough if you don’t have kids? I know in my head that this is subjective. Of course it’s not the same as if I had kids. It felt similar to how I reacted when I read about that woman saying that we shouldn’t complain about being in the military because moving around a lot kept us from getting tired of our neighbors and because we get to see more of the world. All true, but it completely misses the point. This time the comment was that when you don’t have kids, you don’t have to worry about anyone else’s wellbeing and if you want to, you can have cereal for supper. Yes, these are great advantages indeed. Here’s the other side: I realized this week that I don’t really fit in with the military community and I don’t really fit in with the normal world. I don’t know how many people have asked me if the military is a close-knit community because that’s the impression that the TV shows give. It isn’t a close-knit community in my experience. I haven’t really met more than a few people, and now after seeing the other wives, I know that I’d never be friends with them. Even at the briefing all they talked about was getting drunk with their husbands when they got home, which is their choice, but what’s more, they spoke with such a harsh tone in their voice that I found it hard to believe that they hadn’t seen their husbands in several months. I really can’t imagine loving someone to death and caring only that they come home to resume their household responsibilities and help take care of the kids. I want to be careful here too because these are very real longings and I have them myself; I am so excited to not have to carry all the household chores by myself and if we had kids, I’d be so excited to not be single-parenting. But these are secondary longings to me – my first longing is to be reunited with the love of my life. So I don’t fit in with the other wives. I also don’t fit in with the normal world. My friends and church have been really amazing through this whole thing and have given more than I could have ever asked for, but I’m still aware that when I just need to cry at the end of the day, some of my friends are putting their kids to bed and some of them are cuddling with their husbands, and there isn’t really a place for me there. Sure I only have to worry about my own well-being, but it’s really hard to be alone so much of the time and not feel forgotten or like you don’t belong anywhere or to anyone. Sure, I can eat cereal for supper but it’s really sucks to have to cook for yourself all the time and never share a meal with someone or have a reason to care about what you eat. Yes, it’s different for me without kids, but it’s still hard. I’ve started a new job twice, dealt with car trouble multiple times, battled illness, bad weather, depression and hopelessness, so however great it is to be the only one, I really do feel like I’m the only one in this boat.

On a different note, I have been wrestling with the idea of Margin. This is a spiritual practice of sorts that involves leaving space in your life. The easiest way to understand this concept is to relate it to the more common definition of margin, which for most of us is the space around the edge of a written page. Another definition I like is: “a boundary indicating the limit beyond which something should not go or below which something should not fall.” Anyway, it’s a difficult concept to understand because it’s fairly subjective but the idea is that it’s important not to cram your life full because we’re not meant to have every moment so full that you end up missing out on the most important things. I started thinking about this again because it was included in a book I just finished called Good and Beautiful God, which I could say a hundred wonderful things about. The example the author gave was something like this: “Not having margin is like being late to an appt because there was traffic and you were 10 mins late picking your kid up from school because you were 15 mins late leaving work. Margin is having time to get somewhere early and not have to rush.” I really love the thought of margin. I remember saying to Dan a while ago that I hated (strong word, intended) the idea of being so busy that I was rushed and late getting everywhere and that I barely had time to get from one place to the next or do anything I enjoyed because my life was so full. That kind of life is the ugliest thing I could imagine. I really like the idea that I could have a life with space. Putting this into practice is entirely more difficult than liking the idea. Here again we could talk about how having kids makes it even more difficult, so when I have kids I will again wrestle with this idea. I think though that it will be a central practice in my life because it’s necessary for my well-being. So right now it’s not too difficult because I live at least 30 mins away from my friends and very close to work which means that I get to work easily, but I don’t see friends more than once or twice a week because it makes the nights very full to drive an hour plus visiting time. I’ve committed to being involved only with worship at church because after a weeknight practice, I spend all of Sunday morning there. I also want to fit in exercise and music lessons at some point. Plus time with Dan, and God. And enough time to wind down before bed to get a good restful sleep. There aren’t many things packed into my life really, but they’re all good things. What does a person do with all the other good things that need to get done? Like volunteering, helping friends, etc, etc. I don’t know. That’s something I haven’t even worked out, but the best I can tell is that having margin creates the kind of life that makes it possible for you to stretch the margins once in a while without risking a complete breakdown, so that sounds good.

The other thing that I’ve been contemplating is my attitude. I guess somewhere along the way I must have really started hating parts of my life because it seemed like until recently there was nothing I really liked about it. I know that I was unhappy with areas of my life – my relationships were draining, I worked jobs that I really couldn’t stand, I had no purpose or direction and I just felt heavy. I don’t really know why but sometime before Christmas I was driving to the chiropractor, I think, and I remember asking myself – “what is it that you dislike about your life now?” And I honestly couldn’t believe that my answers were so different than years before, yet I was still behaving as if I hated my life. In place of draining relationships I had friendships that were nurturing and invigorating, in place of jobs that I hated I had a new accounting diploma (this is funny now because I’m back in a job that I’m not sure is good for me, and some days, yes I hate it), in place of having no direction or purpose I had a wonderful life of my own with a great husband and in place of heaviness I had a whole lot to be thankful for and joyful about. But it was still really surprising to me that I’d been so blind to the reality of my life. I think what’s more is that I was so used to looking at the world a certain way and behaving a certain way about it that I hadn’t even taken the time to realize that my life’s landscape had completely changed, yet I had painted a picture in my mind that I kept looking at as reality. It was very eye-opening. So since then I’ve kind of been paying attention to that concept when I look at my surroundings. I remember reading somewhere that if living life with God is supposed to grow you into a more joyful, free, loving person, then it’s amazing how many people when they get older end up beaten down, resentful and bitter. This is not what I want to be when I get older. God himself said that he is doing new things in us and one of my friends always said that if God is alive in us, we should always be growing in our ability to love and extend grace and forgiveness and all of those fruitful things. So I guess this is just another way that knowing God actually is supposed to change your life. It’s not like things change all at once, but they do change and we should expect that they change and look for the new things that are coming so that we don’t end up looking through the lens of our old life when we have a completely new one. I feel sad now for the people I see who live as if something that defined their life at one point will be true for them forever. It really is sad because that’s not the truth – the truth is that God is making all things new.

Dear husband, I pray that you’re safe and surrounded by God’s protection and care. I love you.