Seize the moment(s)

I feel compelled to put my thoughts to paper tonight.  I’m really struggling and it is one of those moments where I feel I am on the precipice of a decision that needs to be made and for some inexplicable reason, I don’t feel ready to make it.  I wonder if this is my moment like Peter’s when he says he wants to step out of the boat and walk on the water to Jesus, and Jesus says come and he does, but once both feet get out of the boat, he reconsiders the impossibility of the situation and loses sight of the one who makes the seemingly impossible, possible, thus making Peter doubt and then start to sink.

This is one of those soul searching moments where I am being asked to overturn rocks that hide truths hidden that I’ve allowed the moss to grow over rather than deal with them.  It would be relatively easy for me to allow that moss to stay right where it is, but God has a way of making me very uncomfortable about remaining in the status quo.

I can easily look at others whose lives hang in the balance of success and defeat and know without a shadow of a doubt what their next move should be and I don’t mean to be overly simplistic.  Parker Palmer wrote “The divided life is a wounded life, and the soul keeps calling us to heal the wound.  Ignore that call, and we find ourselves trying to numb our pains with an anesthetic of choice, be it substance abuse, overwork, consumerism or mindless media noise.” (A Hidden Wholeness).  I might not know the exact method I’m employing, because in some way I think I’m  retaining the services of all four to an extent of some sort, although without the benefit of being paid, I’m not doing much in the way of consumerism!

Somewhere in my formative years, and no this is not about placing blame on anyone, I learned the knack of minimizing my needs for others.  Who knows maybe this is something I learned watching my mother as she dealt with four of us kids, while also taking care of her mother and being a wife!  That was the role back then afterall, at least as displayed by Donna Reed, Harriet Nelson, Barbara Billingsley etc.  For those who don’t know those women, they were actresses playing the perfect Moms who cleaned in pearls and dresses.  Dinner was always on the table, their husbands always pleased and their kids perfect.

There were times in school and because I was number 2 in line, I toed the line because of our family reputation.  Good grades were expected and to a certain extent the pressure of performance on the athletic fields was the price I paid to “keep up” with my older sister.  But I woke up every darn day with a sense of fear inside, afraid of failing, of disappointing someone and I never let on about it.  I mean really, who misses 40 days of first grade?  Well that was trauma of a different sort – that damn red light/green light sign for going to the bathroom!

Anyway, I went to college to be a teacher, something I thought I wanted, but I went for the  wrong reasons, which no one, myself included, knew enough to question.  Halfway through I wanted to change my major (like every kid does now a days) but was unable to do so without having to start over, so I covered over my desire and plodded along.  Student teaching was fun, but afterwards I remember the job opportunities being extremely competitive and my Mom tried to encourage me to make myself “different” than the other possible candidates.  In that statement, I somehow heard that I wasn’t good enough on my own to warrant that position or any other and I never applied for thereafter.  My Mom was the encourager for us kids all those years and I don’t mean to smudge her good name.

This many years later, as I am now at the age my Mom was, when she made that remark, I know what she means.  See, when we are young we think we know it all and we think the world revolves around us and that jobs are just going to line up at our doors and we will start whatever position making a boatload of money.  When you are up against kids who might have gotten better grades, or had better skills or a better network – you have to have something that distinguishes you from the other applicants.  I didn’t have that and in learning that “truth” I then too learned about vulnerability……my own.

That lesson unfortunately shaped me.  I learned to settle for jobs that didn’t challenge me, half the time they didn’t even interest me, I really didn’t care or so I thought.  I lived life, worked for the money learning those numbing skills already mentioned, and eventually married and became a mom.  Motherhood I absolutely loved and at this point in my life, I actually stopped waking up with that fear lodged in my stomach!

Unfortunately, the economy faltered in the 80s, as it is now, and we wound up moving and I wound up having to go back to work.  I landed my one and only teaching job when we moved to NC.  It was at a private school and I was 36.  To cut to the chase, I hated the job, I was too long away from what I had learned, and feared that I’d be found out.  That damn fear was back and if you think that kids can’t sense that, you are sorely mistaken.  It was during this job, that I found my passion.  My co-worker was diagnosed with breast cancer.  This was secondary to 4 years earlier when my nephew died of leukemia.  My passion was caregiving.

This many years later, it is still my passion and it is now that I’m finding myself in a quandary.  I have taken the necessary steps to get my license to be a certified nursing assistant as well as taken the steps for training as a hospice volunteer, so I don’t understand what is holding me back in my pursuit of my passion.  Part of me feels I’m just too old (55), part of me doesn’t want to give up some of my freedoms which include volunteering ops with hospice and cooking for the homeless and while my stating the aforementioned makes me sound good, in some ways I think I’m still hiding, I have the "fear" again!

Well now, I’ve typed 2 full pages and will publish this to my blog.  I have promised to always be open and honest in my writings (another passion of mine).  I started this with tears in my eyes and more questions than answers, but I end here with a semblance of thought that as I wish my course to follow God’s will, I need to stop making excuses about the why I can’ts.  God knows I am so tired of excuses and here I sit making ones of my own.  When we grow uncomfortable enough in our scenarios, we will ultimately make the necessary changes and as I once read a short time ago, and may have even written it in my blog……sometimes God lines our nests with thorns so that we can’t get comfortable thus necessitating a move.

I’m telling you, uncovering the stones on your path of truth may not always be fun, but it is ultimately beneficial.

Looking up!~ Barb