Acceptance

Healing hurts.  I must have anticipated this.  This must be why I've put it off. 

But I can swallow either pain or medicine.

To look those days, finally, square in the eye, when I've been so used to averting my gaze, I have to believe will cause sight.

 Have I been trying to lead these little ones, thinking I was in the light, when really I had moved out of the darkness and only into the dim?

So last night, in bed, not knowing whether I'd slept yet or not, words come to voice those painful memories and I write them down today, because I've asked for this.  Knowing it's been needed.

But is there anyway to word these things?  Can I write them with poetry, story, simply as fact, can I even say them, speak of deeds, names, times?

Do we have to reopen a wound, assess the slashing of our own making in order to work out wholeness? 

But that's the problem.  I can't work it out.  I can't walk it off. 

I had felt new for so long, but lately I've noticed residue, sticky.  Baggage packed full of mismanaged damage.

I've said out loud that I've been delivered. 

And I don't even know that girl I was anymore.  I thought I didn't need to.  I'd left her so far behind. Years behind.  But I've begun to recognize that leaving her as such, I'd left the good as well as bad.  In my determination to become new, I became less.  That's not what God intended.  So maybe, it was not God's work which was done but my own.  Maybe I delivered self, or so I thought, and the work that really needs to be done involves revisiting, acknowledging, repenting, rather than burying and ignoring. 

I want it to be completed. 

"In order, therefore, to enter into a realized experience of the interior life, the soul must be in a receptive attitude, fully recognizing the fact that it is to be God's gift in Jesus Christ, and that it cannot be gained by any efforts or works of our own.  This will simplify the matter exceedingly...it is to be received by faith."

-From The Christian's Secret of a Happy Life by Hannah Whitall Smith