I’ve Been Thinking About This A Lot Lately

This has been staring me in the face for a while now; I hate to even admit it, but I have found myself experiencing a depth of loneliness I have never felt before. It has nothing to do with friends and loved ones, for with them, I have been blessed beyond measure, but it does have to do with a falseness in me that I didn’t even know existed.  

In 2008 I met my husband, Jerry, after losing my first husband, Marty, in 2002 to a rare bone marrow disease. Jerry and I married in 2010 and it was one year and four months later that I began to realize that everything with me was not okay. I woke up one August morning with the realization that I had been living a life of extreme legalism, carefully straddling the dos and don’ts while meticulously crossing every “T” and dotting all the “I”s. If you don’t know what I mean, picture in your mind, the tight-lipped, every hair in place, never think or do anything wrong boss, co-worker, or other such perfect person. In other words, I was in control, in control, in control of my thought, my spiritual, emotional, and physical life. If anything needed fixing, I could take care of it. That included both my children and me—because I was trying to be not only mom and dad and give them the life they were used to—but also theirs and my savior. It was a very exhausting place to live and to quote Maggie Smith as the Dowager Countess of Grantham in Downton Abbey when talking to Isabel Crawley she said, “Does it ever get cold on the moral high ground?”¹

Anyway, on that early August morning as I was waking up, I began to realize this and started to cry. As a Christian, I knew with startling clarity that I had been at the helm of my ship instead of letting God guide, fix, and save me. I was all alone trying to do it all by myself. That morning, even though I didn’t understand it, and it certainly didn’t feel like it, was the beginning of freedom from my self-inflicted prison. God began to dismantle my carefully constructed life stripping away what was false from my heart. It hasn’t been a fun time, but it has been a place of learning to rest and wait upon the Lord as He, not me, began a reconstruction from within. Like Eustace, in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader when telling Edmund how it felt when Aslan, the lion, began to tear away the dragon’s scales from his skin, turning him back into a boy, said,

“The very first tear he made was so deep that I thought it had gone right into my heart. And when he began pulling the skin off. It hurt worse than anything I’ve ever felt. The only thing that made me bear it was just the pleasure of feeling the stuff peel off.”²

Is the loneliness still there? Yes, but it’s different from before. Instead of asking, “Why are you doing this Lord? Or “Please take this away,” I have just recently begun to ask, ”What do You want me to see in this Lord; what do You want me to learn?”

As you know from the last blog, that Jerry and I are selling our horses. What you don’t know is that we are praying about, considering buying sheep. To that end, we have been doing as much research as possible before we dive in to this new endeavor. One thing I read, that is rather obvious, is that sheep need protection from predators. Two animals qualified for this job are either a herding dog or a donkey. With the herding dog, it is important not to become his friend because if that happens that could distract him from his assignment. If you decide on a donkey, you should get only one because if there are two, they might bond with each other forgetting their all-important jobs. The fact that the donkey needed to be without another didn’t hit me until a few days later when I was thinking about these past four and a half years. It dawned on me that because of my loneliness, my focus has begun to shift from what I want to what God wants.

Had I not felt this aching aloneness, would I have heard or listened? I don’t think so. I’m just so grateful He cares for me so much as to lovingly wound me.

Jesus tells us to deny ourselves and take up our cross and follow Him. Is this what He is teaching me? I think so…right now…at this moment. But I am sure that because His word, like a many-faceted diamond, has so much depth and an eternal beauty, there is more. Its meaning is always unfolding.

Kimberly

¹Downton Abbey, Season 6.1 2015

²Lewis, C. S. New York: Collier ,division of Macmillan Co, 1978. Print.