My Life and a Random Analogy

Bear with me and picture this: You're doing a report for a class. Let's say Written Comp II, and it's your biggest essay yet. You haven't been doing so well - you're struggling to keep a B - and have to really pull out an A to keep from drowning for the rest of the semester. When you finish, you breathe a big sigh of relief; you can finally get rid of the stress you've been feeling. The next day you turn it in, proud of your work and ready to get it back, expecting an A. A couple of classes go by, and your teacher returns everyone's essays. Without even looking at the comments, you excitedly flip to the last page to find.... D. What?! How did that happen? The teacher must have gotten my paper switched with someone else's... Nope, it's yours. Dumbfounded, you turn back to the first page with the teacher's comments. "Good ideas, but you need to read the directions more carefully." Still confused, you pull out the assignment sheet for the essay. You begin to read, thinking there's no way you missed anything... Wait. Huh? How did I miss that?! Suddenly the anger towards your teacher turns toward yourself. A simple mistake screwed up everything.

Now, that analogy doesn't exactly fit a current situation I've had, but it does resemble it. It does fit others; even very similar ones in class. When something goes wrong, when we mess something up, when others hurt us - we want to look for the cause. Of course, the first place we look...usually isn't in the mirror.

To stray from that a little, think about when you've been hurt by others. Did you blame yourself? Or did you just wonder if you did something that turned them away from you? I did. I questioned everything about myself, pondering what made me the person people turned away from. I analyze things badly enough already; I got worse, and I got pessimistic.

What does it take to get over those things? Once upon a time, I thought that I didn't hold grudges. HaHA. Now I find that pretty funny. However, I believe it depends on what it is. If it's something trivial, I get over it pretty quickly. If it's something that rocks me to the core and truly disturbs me...it's hard. It's really hard. And me trying to fix it just makes it that much harder, because I'm not relinquishing control to God, who knows what to do. Also, it's not just about "getting over it"; it's about forgiving it. I thought I was over it, but I was still letting it control me by not forgiving it. Not forgiving it only hurt me, because I was (and still basically am) the only one who really knew about it.

I've decided that walls are definitely not for me. I can't handle them; keeping things holed up inside only keeps me from letting them go and feeling better. I will be more reserved and in tune with what God wants me to do as far as talking to people about things. I was afraid of being hurt again; not that I'm still not, but I now realize that in order to be truly happy sometimes you must be truly hurt and broken. You have to know the difference. Avoiding one keeps you from the other. That's why we hurt: to know what it feels like to be restored. I've been wishing for quite a while that life was just simple, and I could just get away from stuff. But I can't. And I don't want to. Going through crap makes me appreciate what I gain (and keep) from it. Someday I'll look back on this and think about how much I've grown from this point. And I pray that I will.

It's not going to be easy from here; I know that. I'm not naive enough to believe that. I believe that God can make everything right, but only if He wills it. I don't think He has at this point. I have work to do.

Sorry I started out with a real random analogy that ended up not in any way (really) being related to what I talked about for the majority of this blog. That's just the risk you take when you read what I write. ;)