Sinking

I was five years old the first time I remember leaving Phoenix. On a hot summer night, my mother loaded up her red Toyota pickup truck with all of the belongings she could fit, and my sister and I climbed in next to her. I don’t remember what specific emotions I was feeling, but they overwhelmed me until I was sobbing in the front seat. Mom’s boyfriend at the time leaned in the truck and said his final good-bye to her, and then handed me a cassette tape – for all of you youngins’ that is the old-fashioned version of a CD. I imagine that he figured if he gave me something I would stop crying. He had no way of knowing I would hold on to that tape for decades, that I would play it when I felt like crying, and that I would sing the karaoke version of some of those songs in the bar when I was old enough. Meatloaf’s Bat Out of Hell album was almost four years older than I was, and at five it was probably not the best gift he could have given me. It was years before I understood that the intermission to Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad wasn’t actually a baseball game. I must have listened to that album a hundred times over the years, memorizing every lyric. And tonight as I sat down in my recliner I heard “…and (I’m) sinking, deeper and deeper in the chilly California sand.” Over thirty years have passed since I first heard those words, and many years have passed since I last listened to them, but there they were trying to pull me down, deeper and deeper.

I spent a lot of years in chains, bound by addictions that have plagued my family for generations. Just as I began to unravel those chains, to become spiritually well, my body became physically unwell. I have been in pain more often than I have not been in pain over the past two years. My mother taught me to be strong and I think I have made her proud. Pain has never kept me down, physically. But if I am completely honest right now, it is wearing me down mentally. I have noticed little things – snapping at someone on a particularly painful day, or the loss of my appetite because the thought of putting anything in my inflamed body is repulsive at times – but the little things are become big things.

Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,

Hebrews 12:1

Pain, like perfectionism, has become a weight. A foothold, if you will. My pastor preached this scripture a while back and has repeated it often. It is easy to read right past the word weight and only see the word sin. Sin – for me – was easy to identify. Maybe because the Bible gives us a list of absolute sins in Exodus chapter 20, or maybe because society has her own list. But a weight…what does that even mean? The Blue Letter Bible app says that a weight is a burden, a heavy load, a hindrance. I get a mental picture of a traveler with a pack on his back that is bulging, overflowing. It’s not like he can just fling the pack off of his back and carry on, as the pack most certainly contains items he will need for his journey. Rather, he must stop and unpack, then decide what he has to lay down, what things have become burdensome. When he packed for his journey there were things he felt like he needed, things that somewhere along the way have become more of a hindrance than a help. There was no way that he could have known that at the beginning of the journey, but now, where he is, he can see it clearly. And if he lays it down he will be better off for the rest of the journey, but this doesn’t usually make it a whole lot easier to leave it there and continue without it. A traveler might have to do this several times while he is on a journey, and sometimes it might be a desire to add something better that causes him to evaluate the contents of his pack.

I have often told my kids that they cannot change someone else’s behavior, the only power they have is how they will react. While I don’t have the power to evict the pain that has taken up residency in my body, I do have the power to change how I react to it. I guess it’s not really the pain that has become a weight, but my reaction – or more honestly my inaction – to the pain that has become a weight. I know every moment of every day that the pain is there, but most often I choose to ignore the pain and go about my day. If I wake up with a pain level of 8, I go about my day the same as if my pain level was 2. Why? Because I have to. Or so that’s what I tell myself. The real answer to the why is that because to modify my schedule would require me to 1) admit a weakness and 2) ask for help – both things I dread. When I began my journey I packed a lot of self-sufficiency because in my experience if you don’t do things yourself they don’t get done (or as a perfectionist, they don’t get done how I want them to get done). I knew I would need self-sufficiency, but somewhere along the way (perhaps eleven years ago when I got married) I should have realized that relying only on myself wasn’t the best way anymore. I should have stopped, unpacked a few things and left them by the wayside. My pack got so full that it burst and everything came spilling out, like a clown who has a canister full of those springy snakes. This is not the way I wanted this to go down, but here I am…standing in the middle of the contents of the heavy load I have been carrying for far too long. I can hear the clerk saying “Clean up on aisle 7” over the loudspeaker of my mind. My nature is to rush, to sweep everything into a pile and mend the bag so I can continue along my way and hope that no one notices that it all spilled out. That’s how I have always done this in the past. But I don’t think that is going to work this time. I am going to have to linger here awhile. I am choosing to let my old pack go – with it’s ripped seams and torn straps. It was really too big anyway – I have always been a just in case I might need it kind of packer. I didn’t actually choose my last pack, it was given to me by circumstances from my childhood that were beyond my control. This time, I am going to choose my pack and I am going to allow it to reflect not just who I am, but who I want to become. I am going to evaluate the contents of my load and verify that the cost of each item is equal to it’s benefit. Water is heavy, but I can’t live without it.

And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness, to humble thee, and to prove thee, to know what was in thine heart, whether thou wouldest keep his commandments, or no.

Deut. 8:2

My exodus came when I stepped out of the chains that bound me. And in this wilderness, I have wandered while God has humbled me, and while He is proving me. Now the contents of my heart are spread at my feet to be examined. While voices from my childhood will try to drag me deeper into the chilly California sand, God is here reminding me that this is all part of the plan. In the wilderness I am surrounded by dense brush, the trees are so tall I cannot see beyond….but when I am still, standing in the silence, I can hear the buzzing of the bees in the land flowing with milk and honey.