This past Sunday I went to church for the first time in a few months. Mostly I haven't been there due to my schedule at work, but I haven't really made too much of an effort to do so either to be honest. I've been thinking about it a lot lately and my life in relation to going to church. I've always been a pretty faithful person and believed the things I've believed, heard, seen with my own eyes, felt, heard, and the like. Always through that tried tested and true way of thinking them over before I make a solid decision. That's all great and I'm not questioning that or anything. I'm also not declaring that I've stopped believing in it or anything either cuz I haven't. I guess my real problem is myself or pride or most likely bitterness.
Let me take a step back a little. Everyone in life has their own challenges both great and small. What is a challenge to me might not be one to somebody else and vise-versa, yet in our own ways we go through difficult times from time to time. I can think of quite the handful of challenges in my life that have shaken me to my very core and almost all of them in the past ten years or so. I've not led a difficult life by any means, in fact apparently I've led a pretty sheltered life but not only due to the life that I was born into, the family I have or anything, but also due to my own choices. I've never run into a lot of struggles lots of people have in life because I've chosen to avoid them. Those things might include substance abuse or pregnancy scares or whatever. Those are really generic, but its just to illustrate my point. Not taking a moral high standpoint here either, I'm just wanting to set the stage. No, my struggles generally involve trust and the breaking of it. Betrayal or dishonesty. Sometimes just outright injustice.
Anytime I've been confronted with these major issues in my life I've always relied on the strength of my friends, family, or my faith to get through it. Its never easy and you always feel pretty broken because of it. But in the end you come out stronger and while you never wish it upon somebody else or would ever want to go through it again, but later on down the road I generally see positive results from said difficult times or even the reasoning behind them if I'm lucky. In fact a series of events from 2007 up-til 2009ish seemed to slam into me like a ton of bricks one after another. Each time I fell back, licked my wounds, but kept on trucking always continuing to believe that everything happens for a reason and kept strong in my beliefs and what I've stood for. Good, great. However all of those things seemed to culminate into a new beginning of sorts, a chance to reap the benefits of learning from my mistakes and forge ahead stronger than before. It also felt like good things were coming my way as sort of "you went through all this and came out stronger, now this is what you get for it. Congrats!" Maybe not that exactly, but it sure felt that way when I went back to school in 2009. Hell, even getting back into school at all felt like that. It was a series of not perfect times, but almost rewards and everything seemed to finally be falling into place for once. The dark night was over.
The next two years were no picnic as I had new things to overcome, myself. My pride. My obsessions. My lies. All of that I had to fix and figure out. I made huge mistakes and paid dearly for them, but it was one of the one and only times in my life that I was able to reclaim what I had lost while crawling on my knees while asking for forgiveness, ok so that had happened once before but that's a different story. But whats important is that it seemed like I had learned from my mistakes and fixed them for the most part and life continued to get better. I finally got serious about life and everything about it and it got to where I wanted it. Then everything just sort of deflated and fell apart into what I like to refer to the best/worst year of my life. Early 2010 was awesome. From about October on was awful. And it made me mad.
These things had happened similarly in my life, the difficulties, the challenges, and all that stuff. Only this time it was on a much larger scale because it felt like more of a slap in the face. It felt like "I know you worked so hard for all of this but never mind, now you get nothing". Rather than humble myself about it I got bitter and I got angry amongst my depression. Now I'm not claiming that things were deliberately taken from me or I'm claiming foul play on God by saying you took it all away from me, but I was just bitter none the less. Maybe I did blame him for what happened. Maybe I blamed myself. Maybe both. I don't know but it sure shook everything that I had believed about life and how I understood it to work and I just didn't bounce back from it. Nothing really seemed to sooth anymore after that.
But back to what I was talking about in the first place. Originally it was embarrassment. I didn't want to answer those questions of "when is the date?" "what are you going to do? tell me about her" etc etc. Then it was just being annoyed of hearing about/seeing happy people around me. Then just bitterness of seeing people who I started to judge as crappier than me doing really deceitful things in life, yet still having the one thing in the world I wanted the most. That stability. that feeling of having that one special person who matters to you the most and whom you matter to the most. The thing I thought I had then lost. This time it almost felt personal and a waste of my time. Among the other feelings I had had about the situation and my feelings of being lost, the most often that came to mind was "why the hell did I go through all of that just to be happy and finally have some sort of rest only to have it taken away in an instant?" Rather than ponder it out, I just shut everything out instead. So it became faking enthusiasm of going. Then showing up late but still being there. Then zoning out instead of paying attention, to going for the first hour then going back home and going to bed to finally just not going at all. I guess that's what inactivity feels like.
Flash forward to this week and I went back this past Sunday. I had finally talked to my boss about moving my schedule on Sundays to let me come in a few hours later so that I could attend church like they told me I could do when I was hired but never did. I suppose a happier ending to this entry would to describe some fantastical moment of clarity as I went. Or some bold words of wisdom that made me think and give me hope once again, but nah. That honestly happens more often than not, but not this time. This time its just one of those well....you either do it or you don't. Maybe I've finally started to soften my heart a little to the point of hey maybe I should apologize about that, but I'm not there yet. So in the meantime I'll just take it a step at a time. I've never stopped believing, and I don't think I will, like I said I'm just a little bitter that's all. But even that's changing ever so slowly.
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