This Broken Heart

I’ve been told that we’re supposed to grow from pain. Learn from the past, forgive, grow stronger, gain wisdom and character. Take to our faith in troubled times, and embrace it.

There’s truth in those beliefs. We’re always growing, moving, and changing. Even when we dig in our heels, and hide under the covers. Because you can’t stop life, even when you’re broken, even when your caught in bliss.

If only there was a way to dump out all of the emotions life forces out onto a table and sort them all out. “Here. Here is my pile of what I am mad about. Here’s the stack of happy thoughts. Over there is my sad. There’s a basket of things I need to forgive. There’s the box of what I wish to be forgiven for.” Clear cut, simplified, and sort-able. manageable. Instead of the jumble mix of jealousy, hurt, anger, fear, happiness and so forth that flies back and forth like a dust storm.

Because life keeps moving, and there’s little time to fully embrace each emotion and handle them properly. It’s saying goodbye to one family member who you knew would soon be parting from this earth, to having another one taken without warning before you hung your funeral dress back up in the closet, the awkward heels still in your car. It’s the dying inside while you’re rushing another family member off to the ER, while keeping the kids busy and quiet in the waiting room. Topped off with another family member coming back into your life, that you might not be ready for, because are you still mad, hurt, angry, scared, or morning them? All the while just trying to save every dime to keep your home, and gas in your car.

If only life would just provide time to breathe.

There’s so much to think about, to feel, to deal with. There’s so many words to say. But when you know others are hurting so much worse, you can’t risk that one lonely minute in which you might lose control and fall apart 100%. Because life demands you keep moving.

Oh but this tiny little broken heart is tired of this age of loss it has found itself in. And it’s mad at the mess one family had created. It’s desperate to see one soul once again, even for a moment to say good-bye. It wants to move on, it wants to be ticked, and it wants hurt. And it wants others to let it just be. Alone, hidden, trembling, until it’s too tired to weep anymore. Then maybe it can move on, and deal with the million other demands put in front of it. Maybe then it can love despite the past without judgement. Maybe.

Yet life waits for no one, not even this broken heart.

~Emily

And The Greatest is This

Religious views always differ from person to person. Always.

The idea of faith never changes.  Faith is Believing.  Christian, Catholic, Baptist, Lutheran, Muslim, Cherokee or voodoo… it all takes faith, believing, trusting in something other than yourself.

To not have a religious view or faith in someone other than yourself still requires a faith.  A faith of yourself, a trust that you are right.  Life takes faith.

1 Corinthians 13

Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I have become a sounding brass or a clanging cymbal.

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, but have no love, I am nothing.

And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, but have not love, it profits me nothing.

Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

Love never fails.  But whether there are prophecies, they will fail; whether there are tongues, they will cease; whether there is knowledge, it will vanish away.

For we know in part and we prophesy in part.

But when that which is perfect has come, then that which is in part will be done away.

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face.  Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

And now abide faith, hope, love these three; but the greatest of these is love. 

Life takes love.

Mark 12: 31

And the second, like it, is this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.  There is no other commandment greater than these.

Faith, Hope, Love.  It’s all we got.

Faith is not about which pastor you follow, which books you read, or how many lines of scripture you can rattle off.  Religion is not about being perfect or about being better than another.  It’s about faith, hope and love.  It’s about living your faith, showing it through you actions and leaving the judging to the one who is truly in charge.

We hope to inspire, hope to change, hope to grow.

We love with all we have, and have the faith that we shall be loved back.

And the greatest is Love.

 

{This is an oldy from a different blog I used to have, but seems extremely relevant today, so much so that I couldn’t find one part that I wanted to edit}

~Ten Things~

I’m tongue tied this morning, or more so finger tied.  I’m tripping over thoughts as I try to type them, and I’ve already wasted too much time this morning staring at this blank screen, so let’s make this easy, shall we?

Going with the theme this month from BlogHer, 10 things I love in no particular order as they randomly pop into my head:

1. Waking up early, and having what I call “A Date with my Brain”.  Aka, me time, with my coffee and complete silence.
2. Warm rains.  The kind you can stand out in without freezing your arse off.
3. Sketching with thick paper and a super sharp pencil.
4. The smell of a stable.  Something about the mix of leather, hay, and horse hair gets me every time.
5. Letters from friends, real ones, in the mail.
6. Giggles from the children.
7. Fresh warm bread with butter.  Has to have butter.
8. Sitting at a fire.
9. Throwing rocks into a river.
10. Opening a brand new, fresh, analog, book.  Aka, one made out of paper.

Quick, what’s ten things that you love?

~Going Home~

When the prodigal son returns, he’s afraid.  Very afraid, as the bible tells us.  (keep reading, I’m not getting biblical on you)  He wasted his entire inheritance, abandoned his family, and screwed up royally.  Yet he goes home, faces the truth, and prepares to beg for forgiveness. 

Because at some point we all have to go home. 

But life doesn’t always follow the story.  Or maybe it always does, but it’s the path that becomes entirely different. 

We’re not prepared for the hill that lays in wait just before the doorstep.  The hill built out of fear, hate, spite, revenge, hurt, and denial.  The hill that our home has not built, but the one that the prodigal son has built himself.  And we can’t see our loved ones standing in circles around that hill with shovels, and spades, and even explosives, just waiting for the words to be spoken, just waiting to help tear down that hill.

Yet we choose to add to the hill.  Always heaping on more and more, making it seem impossible.

Until we despise the idea of going home all together.

But you see, going home is not an option you can choose to ignore.  Denying truths only eat at your soul.  One way or another you will climb that hill, eventually.

And just know you have a family, waiting to hold your hand…

~We Won’t Let You Fade Away~

Father’s day will be here soon.  But you won’t be.

We’ll be doing the cards and the handmade signs, the special lunches and dinners, the phone calls, the hugs, the memories.  But we can’t give him, your father, what he wants most.

You.

There will be kisses and hugs, smiles and laughs.  There’ll be soft-spoken words of love from a toddler and grown up man stuff from the boy.  But there won’t be anything from his first-born daughter, not even a phone call or a discount store card.

Just emptiness.  That’s what you gave him.  A hole deep within his soul that no one will ever be able to fill… except for you. 

And I want to hate you for that.

I want to, but I cannot.

And so this Sunday, know that his love for you will only be growing stronger, that we will forever be thinking of you, no matter how hard you may try to fade away…

She’s Not Ready

The feelings had built up over the years.  So many feelings she felt as though she was trying to wade through wet cement.  They were hard to make out.  Which ones were hard truth, which ones had other memories exaggerated, which ones never really happened?

One by one she tried to sort through them, struggling to make sense of them all.  She had wasted too many years, too many relationships, too many opportunities trying to just shut them out.  She had reached her breaking point, and promised that she would not be like him.

The man she loved, but the man who broke her time and time again.  The man who was her all, but couldn’t be there for her.  She didn’t want to follow in his footsteps, even though she never wants to let him go.

She wants to tell him this, all of this.  How he hurt her time and again.  How he forgot about her, how he so easily can turn his back, how he never was there to see the tears she cried… because of him. 

She wants to tell him how so many of her failures were out of the fear he installed.  How she broke many of hearts, out of habits that he had built in her.  How she wanted so much to make him proud, to make him stay, to make him care. 

She wants to show him all that she’s done, all that she learned, the good and the bad. 

She wants to know if he realizes the rage that can build in her blood, the temper she battles, the hate her mind can fester… because of him.  She wonders if he gets that the rush of tears she can’t control is because of him.

She wants to show him how it can be, breaking those chains, building, growing, how life does not need to be this way.  That life is more than the deceit, the anger, the games. 

She wants to tell him, she wants to show him, she wants to ask him why?

She’s not ready.  She may never be.

But she’s okay.  She’s doing fine.  She’s learning, she’s growing, she has overcome. 

And she still loves him madly, and always will for all of time.  He shaped her, he built her, he made her want more, to be more… And without him, she’d never be at all.

Blogs are Like Vampires, Almost

My blog and I seem to have a Buffy (the vampire slayer) and Spike (the evil bad, yet not so bad vampire) love affair.

 

There’s days when I can’t belive how awesome a post came out, how many views came my way, and how much in love I am with the whole process.

Then there’s the days I want to grab my blog right out my screen and choke the living daylights out of it before stomping on it five million times before tossing it to the goat.  And then, maybe, just to be safe I want to take its shattered remains and burn them in a bonfire while doing some sort of voodoo dance to ensure it’s gone for good.

Pressing “Delete” just is not that therapeutic.

Love/hate relationships like this obviously need a lot of therapy. 

I hate having to write, or more so I hate the days when I have NOTHING to write but I know I should WRITE SOMETHING.  I hate the days when I think I have nailed it, and the public tells me otherwise.  I despise the goals I think I have to meet.

But then again, I’d be lost without it all.

It’s my own special private little bad boy vampire without the sparkles.  Because (I’m going to lose every single teen reader I might ever gain RIGHT HERE) vampires should NEVER SPARKLE.