For a dear friend who maybe needs to hear this...

I have heard many times that a person's first perspective gained or understood about God goes back to their relationship with their father.  After 20 I think it may even turn in to who or what I viewed my boss as.

I thought since I always trusted God was not the boogie man, the man with the green face and black top hat, the men in my childhood through my teens- that I never needed to really think about if I believed that he wanted me. It was it was it was that God loved me. The end.
I don't remember what came up recently that had made me ponder this and realize I, for the first time (I think) was not sure if God liked me or wanted me. It all made sense when you go to the root of abandonment, blah, blah... but that whole thing gets old, doesn't it?
I just knew somewhere deep inside where I hide my pink shoes- where I want to hug God... that I had. I had been left, maybe like you. But I had not been left by God.

I remember the Thanksgiving that I met Ken. I didn't realize what I was doing until I was on that front porch ringing the doorbell.  My heart became a sinking cork in my gut. He gave me a doll that said, "Daddy loves his little girl" on a block she was holding. It was pink. It was funny.
I remember asking him how can you love something and never even send a card? He had answers, always did, never the same, never the truth.
I came to realize he was leaving because he was wounded. Who was I to expect something from the wounded?

I think it's easy for us to say that we are the wounded. And we are. But wounds don't have to leave us jaded and dull and angry and bitter and alone with no sense of humor. I will say it again... a pink doll with a pink block that said, "daddy loves his little girl." I was 15. 15.
Anyway...I never hoped for my scars to disappear or to shrink. I think our hearts grow bigger around the gaping holes until the space just doesn't feel as large. But there are some hurts I think that never change shape or size; and I don't think they are always meant to. It's up to me if I allow my heart to grow around them.

So, does God want me? The question was like a wallflower.
I didn't ask it with a victimized heart- I asked it with a heart that realized maybe I should understand why I would ask that question at all.
And so I pictured a man, who let me spit in his face. Who handed me weapons and let me plunder his side. I pictured a man who let me beat all my demons against his chest, inside and against his hands...who saw me on my stomach sick in the middle of my storms in the middle of my nights and all those cruel men who kept me there, and I pictured Ken who can forget his daughter's birthday and who had a horrible taste in dolls (if there is such thing as a good one), and the man that I had bloodied and beaten beyond recognition said, "I want you. You are my beloved. I will not leave you. I have not left you." And he allowed me to hit him- again.
This is Jesus.
He is not the sign on the street corner, he is not the man the left us, he is not ourselves, he is not our emotions, he is not a stranger...

He is not our Ken.
He lives on the floor with us, he wrote our birthdays, he loves us in our darkness, he wants the drunk man on the corner that has probably not even had someone ask him his name in months, the girl who had the abortion, the man that lives in prison, the men that keep girls in a storm on their stomach...he wants all-of-it. He does not cause heartache. No, no, no. After I broke his heart he said to me, "Baby (he calls me that), I still want you. I don't care if you are late, I don't care if you are clean, ashamed, or wrong. I don't care if you are what's left."

Thoughts that fill my journals, closets and the skeletons that keep them company...in no particular order

...times when I said God's name like a frustrating epiphany, when being exhausted really was my fault and times when I told myself with all my might that fault was not the point and, "Hell, even a quarter has wings and sleeps on it's stomach." The times I had to take a look at my own reflection in splintered wood were some of the hardest, because I saw myself for what I, maybe, really was... a misunderstanding, a blur, a splintered mess. But I had to own that. I had to own that. You can spend all day blaming blaming blaming and just wanting to feel better- but apathy will kill you every-single-time. I think apathy is probably the only thing gauranteed to squelch a person.
You can't figure some things out in a week. It's been so long since I have just sat down to write myself awake or asleep or alive that it does not seem like I will ever find my one true sentence again, Mr. Hemmingway... or was it Emerson that said that?
Maybe it all has to change anyway, because I am no longer writing just to keep myself company. Why am I writing?
I read in a journal from 2001 "New York will do the trick." It made me laugh to think I ever wrapped that city in to a word that fits a circus. I should have compared it to a Red Roman empire or Christmas, even...Oz.
After I lived there I decided I had old eyes and had never been young.
I still think that.
That's how I know grace is real; because, it cannot exist without failures. Grace does not exist without days where you put your foot down for all of the wrong things and hands up for all of the right ones...
Afterall, I know my skeletons just won't always fit in my luggage. I have a place to put them. And I do. And God knows all the tricks up my sleeve and he doesn't hate me for it.
And that is grace, and that is real, and that is my one-true-sentence.

You asked. Thank you. And here...

Life is short, the art is long. Being a mother leaves me with the invading sense that opportunity IS fleeting and experience...elusive. Making judgement on how to spend the hours is increasingly difficult.
In the jumble of motherhood I have lost touch with the importance of keeping in touch with myself. Of course, you feel guilty for admitting this. Shouldn't being a mommy BE who you are. And it is. You just have to figure out how to fit all of it inside all-of-it.
We want to be authentic. We don't want to be gigantic shapes (small joke, for those of us that are preggers)...we want to be fantastic shapes. We want to have our sight set on home. The thing is, with the pressure we put on ourselves we eventually act like all herded things will act: we begin to hurry to escape the pressure, then we break in to a trot to madly find all things to make us "me again", and finally we are in a mad run (watches in our hands)- having no idea where we are going and no time to find out. We can't win against ourselves.
It's like we cross our hearts and hope to fly. 
It felt like January when I woke up and like I was sitting on a back porch with cold feet. I just wanted to write something out of my system. My mother used to say, "Sometimes you have to fake it 'til you make it." But what if you make it because you were faking. I have had to release this idea; I welcome the release, actually.
I guess, I am not lost or found.
7.27 pm
23 February 2012