Just A Cup of Things

Posted on April 28, 2014

It’s way too late in the day for me to be having my “morning” coffee, and I’m sure I will reap the consequences around 10:30 tonight when all I want to do is sleep. 

I had a birthday this past weekend and I don’t know if this has ever happened to you, but I have found that Satan always does his best to twist the best things in our life into things that are complicated, heavy, frustrating and ultimately disappointing. What an asshole, right? Like, it’s not like we don’t have enough to fill up our lives with already; what with paying rent and monthly bills, spending too much on beauty products and experimenting with household products to find that million-dollar recipe for DIY face masks, doing our best to keep our bodies, hearts and houses clean, keeping up with children (I don’t have any but I imagine that has to be a project), keeping up with NOT having kids, working through relationships in our lives, and well let’s face it… just being human is a bowl full of “gimme a break here” a lot of the time. So no, we don’t need any extra help making life into a mess. 

Unfortunately for us, the only salary the devil requires from making more mayhem is watching it happen and enjoying our peace being taken away. 

This time last year, someone was taken out of my life that had been a HUGE contribution to almost every aspect of my heart, my personal growth, my spiritual enlightening, I mean you name it – they were a part of it. So obviously this was a hard break, and it definitely broke my heart. I sat outside, chain-smoked the rest of my cigarettes and just stared at the road, just unable to think or do anything. I couldn’t even contemplate what was happening, or why God would allow it to. I was more invested in this than anything else in my life, how could I have gone wrong, how could something so special and so important be ripped from my existence in just a mere moment. 
Well I sat for what felt like hours and hours, and finally I just looked at the clouds and asked God if He was still there. And after a minute I knew I was there too. And though it didn’t change the situation or my hurt heart, I knew everything was bound to be okay. And I gave my heart back to God, and since I apparently had no idea what I needed or what my heart knew for sure, I asked Him to make me a new heart and to show me what love is. 

And a few weeks later… He did. 

Well I guess that would have been a really great place to stop, right? End it with the uniting of me and the man that I love? I mean can we say classic romantic comedy plot? What people in movies don’t tell you though, is between the smiles and the good memories in the making, and the inside jokes and all the really beautiful moments… well there are some really challenging times. And if the past loves to do anything, it’s chase you and if you aren’t careful, it will haunt you. And as we all work through seasons in our lives of growing, and being new people and moving forward, there tend to be moments of very hard conflict. 
And what was at one moment just a loving admiration of a man who is stable, and inspiring, and a wonderful leader… is now a disdain for him because he doesn’t do what I “need” him to, he isn’t as prince charming as I thought and marriage is just really turning out be pretty hard. The great times are now good times, the good times are now fine times, and the fine times are just okay. And our life together has transformed into this ugly picture of people who just deal with each other. 

How exhausting, right. 

I spent the good part of the weekend reveling over my bitterness toward him, myself and of course God for ever getting me into this mess, all without telling him because I didn’t want any of the issues I was struggling with to be real. I didn’t want to be having issues, I just wanted to see him in a perfect light all the time, I didn’t want to be the wife with mood swings or outbursts of anger. However, that’s denial. Because I was struggling, and I was having issues, and I was absolutely miserable over the fact that I was having a hard time and couldn’t solve it myself. Why couldn’t I just get it right, why couldn’t he just magically know what I needed, why was I upset over something that I knew wasn’t right to be upset over, but I was anyway. 

My birthday rolled around and for about the first half of the day we didn’t really say a whole lot to each other. We talked, but we both knew something wasn’t alright with us. 

Finally I told him. I unleashed the manifest of my heart and broke open my gates of steel and threw my vulnerability at him and braced myself for him to not understand, to be hurt that I was unhappy, to take it personally, to think horribly of me. But he put his arm around me, and he just said,
“Ah yeah, I understand… that’s the worst.”

And then he let me talk, and talk and talk and talk. And anyone knows the relief of being able to expose your heart for what it is and have it received with compassion and empathy, and how healing it can be. We sat on our couch, in our house, with the shades open to a stormy evening, drank wine and just talked as equals. Talked about one another’s struggles and the way the enemy works and how to overcome it. 

And I felt my heart regain comfort and peace. And I looked at him, and had a little mini-revelation of God’s mercy and plan for my life. Which may not seem like a big deal, but if there is anything I have learned so far it’s that those moments where you can see another person in the light that God made them in, well it’s like you’re witnessing a miracle, seeing the world a little better, regaining faith in the unknown, jumping back into the river, getting back onto the horse… and all those types of things. 

Life will constantly change, people will sometimes change, and the only way through it all is depending on the only thing that never changes (and I think we all know what that is). The past is the past for a reason, it has to be, and if it wasn’t then it wouldn’t be the past, it would be your present or future.