Sinking ship.

Wheels falling off the cart.

These are the words I have used to describe my life.  My heart.  My story.

Sometimes they are the words I feel are true.

Sometimes they are the words I assume other people feel are true when they look at me.

They’re definitely the words I have felt have been chosen for me.

I am beginning to see how they are also the words that I have chosen to sit under.  The words I have circled in red.  Underlined.  Used a highlighter to accentuate.  The words I might as well have tattooed on my body.  (Don’t worry Dad – it’s just a point I’m making, not an actual tattoo I have received.)

These are my words that I let stick.

And on two different occasions in the past several weeks through two different sets of friends I have been gently reminded that these words are lies.

As in, actual lies.

Just legitimate, from the pits of Hell, lies.

It feels a little like I’ve been outside, wearing sunglasses.  And then – at some point – I walked inside but I kept my sunglasses on.  And I walked around my house seeing things through the darkened lenses but thinking it was normal, thinking it was just the way things looked now.  Then someone pointed out that I was inside – wearing sunglasses.  And removing the sunglasses makes all the ordinary stuff seem brighter, more in focus, less shaded.  I had just forgotten to remove my sunglasses.

This is less like a giant epiphany and more like the steady retraining my heart and mind have had to undergo over the past two and a half years.

See the light.  Remove the sunglasses.

Or, as my friend Jo reminded me this weekend…   Taste and see that the Lord is good.  Taste and see.  Ah, yes.  I had forgotten.  Taste and see.

My life is not less than.

The wheels on my cart are not flying off haphazardly, beyond mine – or anyone else’s – control.

That is a lie.

I am not on a sinking ship.  My family is not drowning.

Some days we might be doggie paddling or treading water for a spell.  But lots of days we’re doing the backstroke and inviting our friends to the pool party.

We’re okay.

I’m okay.  (Except when I’m not.  And that’s okay.)

We’ve got stuff to offer, like everybody else.  We’ve got open arms and family dinners and that open door policy has never shifted.

Maybe it took some dear friends willing to say the hard words to my heart.  To brush off those bits of clinging scales and debris and residue that long to trap me and hold me captive, that long to make our family suffocate under the burden of lies.

We are not drowning.

I am not sinking.

And that feels important to declare.  Significant to see it for myself.

To stop seeing myself as this trapped person living under this burden and to begin to see myself as a free person living a free life.

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