My sister dragged me kicking and screaming to the kind of thing I would have mocked ten years ago...or maybe even ten days ago
This group of people who get together to try to get better. They might find it offensive for me to put it so simply. Or they may think I am missing the point...but it's my blog :)
Get better at life, at love, at letting go. Get better at enjoying sunsets and jokes, get better at riding out the storms and listening to the ones you love.
So I sat with these people, fully expecting to make fun of them the entire time...
Because I am kind of an asshole like that.
The discussion was on letting go. Let go and let God. Finding the faith to trust that a higher power has your back. Turning away from negativity and obsessions. Trusting that all is well.
Riiiiiiiiiiight.
As a gal with a touch of OCD I can fully and whole-heartedly admit that I am absolutely in charge. I have learned not to just survive, but thrive, in a world that was stacked against me. Poor, uneducated parents with no apparent social skills raised me. I was kicked out of church for who I loved, forced to leave college because my parents wouldn't co-sign a loan...etc....etc....I was on my own completely by aged 20.
Everything I have I made for myself. Navigating the way with no role models. But I fear that my obsessive struggles to maintain even keel are keeping me from enjoying my life. I have fought so hard to get where I am that I may have forgotten how to enjoy my successes.
So tonight I will try to begin to let go....and try to believe that everything is just as it is supposed to be.
I am currently in a job that I dread to go to, hundreds of miles away from my missing piece, and days go by without a call from my circle of friends. So even writing "everything is just as it is supposed to be" makes me sad. It doesn't make any sense that my destiny on this earth was to parent alone, in a 2 bedroom rental, working along-side peers who openly contempt me.
But I suppose this is exactly why I need to re-evaluate my life. I want to love and feel loved every day. I want to believe with every piece of who I am that I am on the right path. There are real problems in the world.... I don't want to let self-pity and self doubt distract me from being the best version of myself I could be.
I ran across this tonight in some reading....and it makes me feel like maybe I can do this. Maybe I can get better :) And for my heathen friends, try to read past the heavy handed verbiage and just hear the message.....
Isn't this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke? Is it not to share your food with the hungry and to provide the poor wanderer with shelter — when you see the naked, to clothe them, and not to turn away from your own flesh and blood? Then your light will break forth like the dawn, and your healing will quickly appear; then your righteousness will go before you, and the glory of the Lord will be your rear guard. Then you will call, and the Lord will answer; you will cry for help, and he will say: Here am I.
If you do away with the yoke of oppression, with the pointing finger and malicious talk, and if you spend yourselves in behalf of the hungry and satisfy the needs of the oppressed, then your light will rise in the darkness, and your night will become like the noonday. The Lord will guide you always; he will satisfy your needs in a sun-scorched land and will strengthen your frame.
