Sometimes I just feel so overwhelmed by everyone else’s wants/needs for my life.
Every time I pray Dear God let me have the strength to do what needs to be done to guide me on the path YOU have chosen for me. Help me to be the best person I can, to be kind and courageous. Allow me the wisdom to see the truth and seek it. Lead me when I am not strong enough to go on. Increase my love for my partner as you increase my love for you. Keep us close, and always open to change and growth together as with you. Bless us, Lord.And then, at the end of the day, I think that maybe I’m not looking in the right direction. All of your family can’t be wrong….right? They can’t all be saying those things because they’re wrong… And I question myself. I look inside, I examine, I penetrate my depths and pray. Pray, pray, pray, pray….
But I turn and look, and I see a desolate wasteland—a ravaged landscape of lost dreams, conforming to a dream that is not their own, nor God’s dream for them, either. I look, and I am terrified…. This can’t be what they want or need. That can’t be right. Therefore, it has to be wrong.
And the one person with the right eyes cannot show them the other side of the world. It does not exist. To them, it is an insane person’s dream, the dream of danger, risk, and deception. It only looks good in a warped mind, they say. They say it is stupid and ignorant of how things actually work. And, do you realize what you need to do?
I think I must be going mad…
I AM going mad…
And I’m getting madder. I listen and listen. I swallow every word. I choke down their bitterness, their anger….their sadness and regret. Their attempts at ‘REASON’ and ‘SANITY.’ Their love is a snake, opened mouth swallowing me inch by slimy inch. Until I’m filled with it, vomiting up all that disgusting puss that was their endeavor to change me.
I fight the urge to scream at them all the time, biting my tongue for lack of comforting things to tell them. For what can I say to a mind that is already convinced of someone else’s fallacy? My words would only sink me deeper by a ‘lack of understanding.’ And any eruption on my part would be seen as a child’s temper tantrum.
Then they have the gall to accuse me of ungodly behavior, of hurt and shame—I must have done these things for them to be so offended by me. How am I to even chip at your wrought iron armor if there is no hole for you to see through? I may chip the wrong place and gouge out your eye….I don’t think you’d miss it much.
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Believe me. That’s all you had to do. Now I know why God cries…
