letting go

Faithfully Thinking: When it feels unnatural to not worry and ruminate but you stop doing it anyhow

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 6 Comments

I didn’t feel like writing a post about trusting God this week but I did it anyway.

There are times it feels unnatural to let go of a situation and walking in the knowledge that you cannot fix that situation.

Sometimes it feels impossible to let God take care of something, even though we know he is the only one who can.

I’m going through that now.

I have gone through it before.

I will also go through it again.

I believe there are times we have to do what feels unnatural in our walk with Christ.

Natural for me is to lay awake and worry.

Natural for me is to try to fix it – whatever it is.

Natural for me is to manipulate a situation so I can fix it in my own power.

More times than not, trying to fix a situation on my own has resulted in disaster.

This week I am in a battle of the mind.

When I start to ruminate on an issue we are having as a family this week, I have been trying to tell myself to stop and that God will handle this situation. Sometimes it has worked and sometimes (like part of today) it has not.

Instead of lying awake in bed or walking around the house writing my hands, I have picked up a book, taught a kid a school lesson, watched a funny old show, cooked, or made myself a cup of tea and taken ten minutes to slowly sip it.

Am I succeeding in letting God take control of my situation this week?.

Sometimes I am. Sometimes I am not.

The last three days I have been anxious and paced, rolled over at night a few times, stared at the ceiling, and overthought a bunch – but I have done all of those things less than I usually have when life is stressful and I call that progress. Slow progress but still progress.

I’m not going to lie — It has felt like I’m doing something wrong by not worrying or ruminating or trying to figure it all out.

It has felt like I am not my normal self.

Sometimes, though, in certain situations, being our normal self is exactly what God doesn’t want us to do.

He doesn’t want us to be our normal anxiety-ridden self.

He doesn’t want us to have a God-complex and think that we can do what only he can do.

He wants us to know that he is in control, even when we don’t understand what he is doing.

All this could change tomorrow, but, hopefully, I will remember that even if it feels unnatural to trust and place my worries in his hands, I need to do that because God is God and I am not.

Why do the Jehovah Witnesses only come when I’m not wearing a bra?

/ Lisa R. Howeler / 10 Comments

My son came down the stairs with his English book as soon as I closed the front door and tossed their propaganda on to the couch.

“Jehovahs , huh?”

“Yeah. I thought we had got rid of them when I told them that our beliefs on who Jesus and the Holy Spirit are are vastly different than theirs but they’re back.”

“I knew it,” my kid said with a slight eye roll. “I was up there thinking ‘it’s probably the Jehovahs because my mom isn’t wearing a bra again.'”

That pretty much describes my life and I could say lately but that’s my life always – weird.

It’s true that I was wearing the stay-at-home-homeschooling- mom uniform when they knocked on the door and I knew it was them because, sadly, they are about the only people who ever stop at my house. Christian churches I have attended don’t believe in visiting people in person anymore it seems. They think they’ll only win souls by posting a clip on their social media account of a hipster pastor preaching or opening a hipster coffee shop. I like the word hipster and I am fully aware it makes me sound older than dirt. God forbid Christians today knock on a door or two, but then again I wouldn’t be a big fan of that either. I was an introvert before Facebook made everyone else one.

This weekend I realized, not without disappointment, that my friends are merely acquaintances, which means they never knock on my door either. I came to this conclusion about my pseudo-friends when I realized not one of those friends knows anything about me. Not one knows my favorite food, favorite color , what music I listen to, movies I watch, books I read or even what I think about many issues. I thought about what would happen if one of these acquaintances got sick and I realized I would have no problem helping them until they got well again, but it hit me, pretty full force , that they wouldn’t do the same for me.

How do I know this? Maybe because none of the people who used to be in a group I called friends almost never ask how I am. In fact only one person I’ve known for more than a few years as a friend has asked me this. It is what it is so don’t pity me. It is the natural evolution of friendships, though it took me a long time to actually except the demise of all my Nike friendships.

Other friends from high school or college never text, call, email or even send a carrier pigeon. (Getting a carrier pigeon would be so cool, though, wouldn’t it? Open up your front door and a pigeon is just sitting there with a message in its’ mouth, tilting its’ little head back and forth so its’ beady eyes can look at you while it coos ? That would be hilarious.)

Am I trying to paint a picture here that I’m a victim? No. Does it sound like I am trying to convince you I am a victim? Probably. But I don’t mean to.

What I am doing is realizing that for years I have sat wishing my friends were remotely interested in spending time with me (yes, I have asked and their response is usually “we will have to do that sometime,” but sometime never comes.) and wasting my time by getting my hopes up only to have those hopes ignored. I wasted way too much time looking at a phone to see if my message was returned or waiting for the phone to ring.

What I should have been doing instead is letting go of the past and that means letting go of people who used to be my friends and accepting they’re merely acquaintances now, which is fine and simply a part of life.

Maybe then I’ll look toward my future, instead of wallowing in, and moaning over, the past. And maybe then I’ll have enough gumption to change my daily uniform so that the Jehovah Witnesses don’t catch me braless again.