If it is encouraging, let him encourage.

Life has been hard lately. My life has never been without obstacles and challenges and I have not regretted it. I have often had to decide to be happy in the middle of the mess rather than just waiting for the mess to get cleaned up. And I have been happy. But these last few months have been a new kind of hard. That is, they have been some of the most ostensibly discouraging. I was neither the cool kid nor the awkward one who got bullied. Rather I was often if not always the quiet one no one really talked to until they had to. Lately, I have felt like I'm back on the school playground at recess again. I guess that's the working world? Or the industrial world? Or just my world?

The primary means of communication has turned out to be a solid mixture of sarcasm and complaints. When people stop complaining about you, they've stopped caring about you. When they've stopped caring about you, you are about to be fired. Therefore, if you find yourself barraged by unreachable demands and stinging sarcasm, take heart because you are probably doing well. They would not criticize you if you couldn't take it. It's a form of respect to be torn down daily.

I have never been so thirsty for kind words and encouragement in my entire life. I am trying to find the syllables to ask friends for what I need... but I am far away, physically, from everyone. I feel out of sight and out of mind. Moreover, it seems that the people I do find are also experiencing a drought of encouragement. We are brittle and hollow and trying so hard not to break. I keep finding more people who need encouragement.

This is not my gift. I am not known for my kindness and certainly not for my gentleness. The closest I come to being encouraging is praying for and with people and being really willing to share people's grief and believe long after faith seems vain. These attacks, however, require so little faith. They do not speak to grief. They do not in any way engage my strength. Rather, they speak to my false sense of humility that whispers variants of "you are not doing enough" and "you don't know what you are doing" over and over until I am deaf to anything else.

I am resilient and strong. ...but only to a point. At this point, I have to choose if I am going to keep feeling or if I am going to be strong long after I should have broken. And so, I break. A lot. Frequently.  Again and again. It is not quite like bleeding. It is more like letting sand slip through your fingers--a sort of letting go of the quest to be stronger than rock. I crack open and I slip and pieces I cannot identify blow away.

They tell me that I wont make it in this industry if I am so sensitive. They tell me that this is what it is to work in a man's world. They tell me this is the way things are. They tell me I am wrong in at least a thousand ways. And then they laugh at any question of health and how things should be. We are all wiser than those dreams. No one is healthy here, only strong.

It would seem that I am being taught how to be an encourager in the strangest of schools. Everyone I work with is so thirsty for encouragement, but so untrusting too. Like they have been given poisoned water so many times that they are afraid to drink from even the most honest oasis in the middle of the desert. We are all strange creatures.

I have never built something so much out of my own need before and it is exhausting. I think I will like who I am when this is done and that gives me hope. But for now, I am so aware of my own fragility, my brittle edges, my own weapons that I use to cut down when I should build..it is hard to feel like giving when so much is being taken and stripped away. That reminds me of a professor as he spoke on the book of Romans. When he came to chapter 8 where Paul lists peoples gifts and tells people (redundantly) what to do with their gifts, he stopped to explain.

I was surprised, seeing that these verses seemed to me the easiest to interpret of the whole of Scripture. You know, leaders should lead and servers to serve and merciful people should show mercy. Teachers should teach and so on. But he stopped here and I will never forget what he said with genuine weakness in his voice and the beginnings of tears in his eyes. He said these were hard commands to keep because it would seem that we are to do these things regardless of our circumstances. Our gifts are given to us to use and therefore we are obligated to use them. He asked the class, "who encourages the encourager? If the encourager is discouraged, does he or she stop encouraging?" And with all of the pain of the many years of his tired but still encouraging body had, he said, "the encourager is still supposed to encourage even when he or she needs encouragement." In a perfect world, someone would encourage each encourager...but we will never find that world and we will never resemble that world if we wait for eternity's perfection. 

I am afraid. If I am telling the truth, I do not want to encourage because I feel so empty inside some days. (It will be 5 months of verbal attacks next week.) I do not feel strong or equipped or ready. And I do not want to be. I want to be taken care of and healed. It is hard when the most encouraging people are hundreds and thousands of miles away...besides my boyfriend, but he is one man against a torrent (he never was supposed to be my only strength). But these are the walls of the room I live in. These are things that I do not know how to change. I do know how to be honest and hopefully I will learn how to encourage.

Don't look in the mirror.

I am struggling--have been struggling--don't expect to stop struggling any time soon.

I think the Christian way to say this is that "God is refining me". But I do not often think in the Christian way and all I feel is disgust and dread and a little bit of fatalism. I am learning about myself...the trap doors and movable walls and booby traps. Here we go. They were made for someone else; but, once made aware of such things inside of me and how they affect those around me, I begin to fall into one after the other in rapid succession. I am not allowed out. The hallways are long. There are stairs missing. I have already made mention of the moving walls and alluded to the sharp things that find you in the dark.

But worst of all is the feeling that I am responsible for this even though I have no immediate knowledge or secrets that could ever help me to safety. It is, after all, the inner workings of my emotions and intellect and that damned tongue that keep this fun house dangerous and make a haunt out of what should be a home.

I think the Christian solution is to pray more. But I rather feel like hermitting in the woods. Besides, I am certain that improvement will be slow, dangerous, and always a little too late to save those whom I would spare the razors and mazes if I could.

blindness

Tonight, I watched a movie called Volviendo and I listened to a woman share about her life before, during, and after being trafficked. She now works to help other survivors reclaim their humanity, their self-worth, and especially their health. I had this question burnt into me as I watched and listened: how do you stare into the darkness for so long and still see?

Me? I am torn. I do not want to look away and neglect the darkness. But I am small. If I stare at it too long, I am sure it will creep inside of me, take up residence, flood me, spill out, and not even notice me struggling to breathe. The darkness is...dark. And I? I do not possess any light of my own. Most days, I forget about the light I have been given and I trade it. I let go of the joy of the Lord for busyness. I let go of my self-dignity for productivity and survival and getting to wherever someone else told me I should be going.

I am fragile. And the world is heavy and sharp and full of broken things that want to make me like them. It is hard to even figure out where to stand much less how to stick both of my hands into those dark places and keep trying to pull them that would come out. The dark is full and everywhere and deep.

I know God is big. I know He uses small things, weak things. But I am certain that I will break if tried.

But I cannot look away. I want to some days. I want to move to suburbia and construct a beautiful life that is so safe and so far away from all of these things. I want to reduce injustice to stories and brokenness to the part just before the fairy tale gets good. But I cannot. I love true things, even when they are ugly. Ugly truth is still more trustworthy than the most beautiful of lies. And healing, healing makes the broken places worthwhile. I have never met someone who has been down that very, very long road who has been disappointed with the result.

But I am so unqualified to help the people around me to find healing. I have tried in good ways and bad. And both of failed much more often than they have succeeded to any degree. Of this I am certain, I am no good at healing. I am afraid that I am very bad at loving people, especially the closer they are to me. I have some very good intentions sometimes, but I am a clumsy healer in the least poetic sense. But this is not really about me. This is about that overwhelming darkness and how much respect I have for people who have the strength to stare into it without going blind.

I met a woman a few days ago. She asked for a cigarette and money to feed her children. My boyfriend gave her $5 and I asked her name. Charlotte. Whatever her life had brought her, it wasn't what she dreamed of when she was 6 years old. Whether she told us the truth or not is not really important. I see her and so many other people walking about under a weight that has left them feeling less than human. And I want to teach them their worth. I want to heal them. But I cannot. The darkness is there. And I do not yet know how to penetrate it. I can only peek into it for now and hope to learn something which may yet equip me to be one who stares into it making the most of every opportunity and never goes blind. I want to see what is there as it truly is, but I do not yet know how.

October Leaving

I kept a pretty thorough log of 'doing one thing everyday that scares me'. A lot of days were pretty uneventful and I really had to examine myself, but I succeeded everyday except for October 11th. Most of the things I was scared of had to do with hurting other people even if I needed to do what I should (like tell the truth or just say 'no I can't do that') or with not feeling equipped to handle a situation and being afraid that it was going to end very, very badly. I was just going to post the list, but things repeated a lot and I have decided I do not like the list format. It kind of divorces the fears from their context and I'm not so much a fan of that.

A few of the highlight events that revealed these things were my oral and practical exams for my mechanic's certification (I have never tried so hard to do something I didn't want to do!), dealing with some family/financial drama, trying very hard not to pick a fight with my landlady, and trying to learn how to cope with life without shutting down my emotions (apparently that means I stay home from school if I have a migraine, say what?). Oh and I bought a dress and danced with my boyfriend *in front of people*.

All in all, I am very glad October is over...not so that I can stop doing scary things, but because it was a very full month. My prayer for November is that it shows a little mercy. However, the mercy I receive may or may not be related to the mercy I allow myself to take in. October was confronting fear, maybe November can be about receiving mercy and grace. October, unrelated to the confronting fear, taught me a lot about my shortcomings, faults, failures, and the way in which I hurt people. I am very acquainted with all the things which make me ugly. I could use a healing balm. I expect anything that could bring healing to initially be terrifying, but I may just be ready.




Oh, also, I am an A&P mechanic! That was one of the gifts October left me with.

October Coming

"Do one thing every day that scares you." Eleanor Roosevelt

At the end of October, expect a detailed list. If you feel so inclined, share yours. Some days should be more exciting than others.

Real Fear

I am afraid.

I am afraid in new ways I have not yet known. This is real fear. I know a lot of people who are afraid of a lot of things. I often times do not understand. But here I am, very much afraid, and only just now finding the words to say what it is that I am feeling and have been feeling.

I am afraid that it did not happen.

I am afraid that I woke up.

I am afraid that I am starting over.

I am afraid.

And if it never did happen, maybe it never will.
If it was a dream, maybe it will never be real.
If I have to start over, maybe I will not start at all.

Maybe. Maybe. Maybe.

Being done with mechanics should be a relief; but I am back at Bible College for my senior year. The longer I am there and the more I adjust, acclimate, and succeed... the farther away the last two years feel. Maybe they did not happen. Maybe I do not know anything about airplanes at all. If I do, maybe I will forget. Maybe it was just a joke or a vacation.

I was kind of hoping it would be the rest of my life.




It will take all of my strength to hold onto both of my realities until I graduate and forge a new one.