Part 2 Misconceptions: “I was born sick, but I love it”

Part 2: Misconceptions: “I was born sick and I love it.”

            Proverbs 14:1 “The wise woman builds her house but with her own hands the foolish one tears hers down.”

            Proverbs 14:13 “Laughter can conceal a heavy heart, but when the laughter ends the grief remains.”

            Proverbs 14:15,16 “Only simpletons believe everything they’re told! The prudent carefully consider their steps. The wise are cautious and avoid danger; fools plunge ahead with reckless confidence.”

            Proverbs 14:22 “If you plan to do evil, you will be lost; If you plan to do good you will receive unfailing love and faithfulness.”

            I am a huge music person. My kids will tell you that when I find a song that I really identify with I will play the same song over and over and over for months. They love that about me, the variety of my music. 😊 You might be familiar with the Hozier song, “Take Me to Church”. This would be one of those songs. For those of you who are not my children and have not heard this song 3,954 times, I’ve included the lyrics for you. (For those of you who would rather listen the link is embedded as well.)

            Hozier: “Take Me to Church” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t0imaSCnSuA

My lover’s got humor
She’s the giggle at a funeral
Knows everybody’s disapproval
I should’ve worshipped her sooner
If the heavens ever did speak
She’s the last true mouthpiece
Every Sunday’s getting more bleak
A fresh poison each week
“We were born sick”
You heard them say it
My church offers no absolutes
She tells me “Worship in the bedroom”
The only Heaven I’ll be sent to
Is when I’m alone with you
I was born sick, but I love it
Command me to be well

[Pre-Chorus]
Aaa, Amen, Amen, Amen

[Chorus]
Take me to church
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life
Take me to church
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life

[Verse 2]
If I’m a pagan of the good times
My lover’s the sunlight
To keep the goddess on my side
She demands a sacrifice
Drain the whole sea
Get something shiny
Something meaty for the main course
That’s a fine looking high horse
What you got in the stable?
We’ve a lot of starving faithful
That looks tasty
That looks plenty
This is hungry work

[Chorus]
Take me to church
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I’ll tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
Offer me my deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life
Take me to church
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I’ll tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
Offer me my deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life

[Bridge]
No masters or kings when the ritual begins
There is no sweeter innocence than our gentle sin
In the madness and soil of that sad earthly scene
Only then I am human
Only then I am clean

[Pre-Chorus]
Oh, oh Amen, Amen, Amen

[Chorus]
Take me to church
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
Take me to church
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
I’ll tell you my sins and you can sharpen your knife
Offer me that deathless death
Good God, let me give you my life

            Now, you may be wondering what this song has to do with the Scripture I started out with. You may also be wondering why there are so many when I normally start out with only one. I’ll start with the beginning of the song lyrics and tie it all together. When I first started listening to this song, the line “she’s the giggle at a funeral” caught my attention. I have zero problems laughing when something is funny to me. God gave me a fabulous sense of humor and an amazing ability to find humor in things that others don’t find amusing. I like to crack jokes and make people laugh. You may have noticed that a funeral is not something that is incredibly amusing, and people don’t go there hoping to find something to laugh at. Connect this with Proverbs 14:13 for a second and let it marinate. “Laughter can conceal a heavy heart, but when the laughter ends the grief remains.” The rest of the song clicked with the way I viewed church with “Every Sunday getting more bleak, fresh poison each week” and the way I knew I had handed my “sins” to people so they could stab me in the back with them. I looked for nothing but deathless death from the people that hadn’t been given the authority to give me life. I particularly enjoyed the line, “That’s a fine-looking high horse, what have you got in the stable?”

            I heard for most of my life that people didn’t like complainers or whiners or people who could just never seem to find the good in anything. The quote, “It’s better to laugh than cry” was my personal mantra for a good portion of the hardest times in my life. But what happens when you just find things to laugh at without looking at the grief underneath them? For me, it became a coping mechanism to ignore the things that my heart couldn’t handle. What happens when the inside of you isnt’ laughing along with your outside and the people you tell your stories to?

            I said a few posts ago that I didn’t need to keep writing my story in the same format as the one I had been using. My reason for changing that is because in the ten years after my divorce that I was in a relationship, the explanation could be found simply in Proverbs 14:1 and Proverbs 14:15, 16. There were things that told me that my relationship with the man I was with was not a good place for me to be. I didn’t listen…I was sick of feeling like junk inside all the time and for awhile my relationship offered an escape from all of those things. However, the saying, “Wherever you go, there you are” would absolutely come back to haunt me. As with my kid’s dad, this relationship was one I never should have entered into. Not only had I still not healed from my childhood, but now I had thirteen years of a marriage to carry around as well. Things were just too heavy, and I was sick of always being the one that was responsible. The one who everybody depended on. I wanted to have fun. Everybody else was. This relationship not only didn’t end up being fun, but it ended up being the relationship that crushed any spirit I had left. Not necessarily because of who I was in it with, but because it was nowhere near what I wanted a relationship to be and somehow his approval, even though I didn’t want it, became more important to me than the desires I had for my own contentment and happiness. It was also the reason that I hurt other people when it was over. I tore myself apart and in such a way that showed everybody I had no self respect.

            I always thought that when you broke up with someone you didn’t want to be with, it didn’t hurt you. When you knew it was over that was the healing, that was how you kept from going through it again and then the next time things would get better. What a strange thing to keep thinking after two long term committed relationships that had no resemblance whatsoever to what I wanted or hoped for. It wasn’t leaving the man that hurt. It was what I had allowed to become of my state of mind. To be frank, the man could have fallen off the face of the planet and I wouldn’t have noticed. I was too busy arguing with my insides to pay him any mind at all. I tried to be everything, and I wanted someone (just not him) to try to be my everything. If I had taken time to heal and to learn a fraction of the things I know now, maybe I wouldn’t have put myself in the situations that I found myself in.

            During this breakup was both the best and worst year in my career that I’d had so far. Due to being short staffed and some turmoil in the administration we had, I was being asked to do extra things that weren’t in my job description and I absolutely loved it. It became a problem for me with my same level colleagues and every time I turned around, I heard another rumor about what I was doing or what they thought of my clothes or how I was handling situations. It was also at this time that I got the gift of a lifetime in the form of a new boss. She saw me work with the kids and she was an absolute powerhouse. She took me under her wing and gave me special projects to do. I was eager to learn and I wanted to do nothing more than help my kids succeed. She sent me on errands and asked me to take over classes. Mrs. Boss was the tiniest woman I have ever seen and yet when she was with the kids or with the other adults, she was ten feet tall. I loved her. She didn’t mince words and she had the wisdom of Solomon himself. She encouraged my heart for my students and when I came to her with questions, she would often look at me and say, “What do you think about what you just said?” Her question made me look at the reasons why I was doing things the way I was doing them and I often tweaked something and I could tell by the way she looked at me after that I had come up with the “right answer” on my own. She gave me confidence and she became the beginning of my road to finding my purpose.

            You may remember that my facial expressions have been a bit of a problem for me. I don’t do a great job of hiding things when people make me mad. It shows on my face…and it is very plain to see, even if you don’t know me that well. My face and the attitude with which I carried myself, compounded with the things going on in my personal life didn’t really help my relationship with the other people I worked with. There seemed to be two sides. Those who loved me and couldn’t wait for me to get to their classrooms and those who fed the rumor mills and continued to judge everything I did. Again, I wanted to fit in, but I was fitting in with people who propelled me into more learning, not the situations I was already adept at handling.      

That year ended and I kept a few friendships, but when the next school year started and my position changed to become closer to my job description than the extra work I’d grown accustomed to handling, I began to feel very unfulfilled. I couldn’t figure out how to leave my kids to move on, but I knew I wasn’t being utilized in the way I was meant to be used in a school setting.

Proverbs 14:22 “If you plan to do evil, you will be lost. If you plan to do good, you will receive unfailing love and faithfulness.” I wish that I would have opened my heart to healing before that next school year. School was the only place I felt alive and even that had been taken from me with the removal of my mentor. Most of the people that I’d had issues with the year before were gone due to high turnover rates, but I was still incredibly unhappy about being stuck in a smaller role than I was “supposed to be in”. I realize now that if I had let Jesus in then, I wouldn’t have spent the next year tearing my own house down.

I have never been great at being single. Mostly, because I don’t like it. Relationships are safe to me. Usually, they offer a fence where you have the ability and the moral responsibility to stay away from certain things. We could just insert the entire Proverbs book Chapters 14 and 15 and probably a lot more verses that would be applicable to this point in my life, but I’m sure you get my point. If I’d spent any time at all praying in this year, I’d have heard God tell me to run. Run away from the choices that I was making and run right into him. I did not. I ran right into another situation and this one would completely take me down.

Losing my relationships with my kids’ dad and the broken man didn’t hurt the parts of my heart that I had walled off to them. They’d never been in to see those parts, so those were pretty much left intact. Yes, things hurt, but not in a devastating fashion. I was hiding all of the things that made me look unloved. Except one person managed to get into those walls and climb around inside my heart and then ended up finding his way into my soul. I could feel him with me even when we weren’t together. Certain songs that we had talked about would come on the radio every time I got in the car. I could smell him for weeks on end when both of us were too busy to be able to find time to spend together. He would text or call sometimes and say, “I felt you needing me. What’s up?” I fell. Harder than I have ever fallen for anyone else. I loved that man with my whole heart and my whole entire soul. I felt like I was the most beautiful woman in the world to him, not because of what I looked like, but because I let him see all of me and he was addicted to who I was. We would stay up for hours talking and he asked so many questions. He wanted to know everything. The more I told him the more he wanted to know. We talked about family and work and always feeling like we had to be perfect because people counted on us. We talked about how alike we were and how being a Christian was hard. We talked about never feeling like we had the right answers. We didn’t fight and the few times I got upset with him, he listened instead of doing things I was used to. He didn’t make fun of me or tell me I was wrong. He just listened. He made me CD’s that had songs that told of feelings he had for me and told me to play them when the world was keeping us apart. He didn’t know it, but I had always considered that to be one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard of and had dreamed of having a relationship with someone who would do those kinds of things. The songs were deep and meaningful, and I cried through most of them every time he made me a new CD. He loved me so much and it was the first time I was ever able to say I loved someone with everything I had.

One day, I got upset with him for not being around when I was having a tough day. I didn’t say anything at first, but a few days later, after I’d gotten over it and wasn’t mad anymore, I decided to talk to him about it. He told me he couldn’t see me anymore. Not because I was upset, but because he was terrified of letting me down when he couldn’t be around for everything I needed him to be there for. He said he loved me, and it hurt him to even think about being seen as a disappointment by me. He said I deserved better than him.

I didn’t know it then, but I think God allowed this relationship to become my most important one because I needed to feel what real love was like. I hadn’t had to hide anything, and I hadn’t had to take care of him. However, it would be a little while before I could go about looking at that relationship at all. Luckily, our breakup occurred on a break from school, so I didn’t have to worry about not looking like I was struggling with my students. I did, however, look like I was struggling to my own children. I was broken now, more so than I had ever been before. It seemed like I was just destined to go without what I wanted the most in my life. A relationship with a man that had seen all the bad in me and loved me anyway.

I quit taking care of myself. I started hanging out with some very seedy people and I just didn’t care about who they were or what they wanted from me. As long as they were fun, I was game. I didn’t participate in most of the activities they did, but when they were done living their lives and doing whatever they did outside of being with me, I would hang out with them and we would talk, and laugh and sometimes things would go too far and I would resolve to not hang out with those kinds of people anymore. But nobody who had any sort of respect for themselves at this point would have hung out with me. I was a broken, bleeding, worthless, disgusting mess of a person. I didn’t know what I wanted, and I could have cared less. I found myself settling for less and less just to have a person around. I had no respect for myself and I made decisions that showed that over and over again. I had no idea how to come back up from this hopeless life.

 I spent the summer in a drunken fog until one day my son Zeb came home from work and I hadn’t moved off my perch on our couch. I had been in the same spot, in the same clothes, and in the same mood as I had been for the last few days. I was working, but at a job I hated and so when I had days off, I just stayed on the couch until it was time to get up to go again. I was heart sick, body sick, mind sick, soul sick, and any other kind of sick a person could be. Zeb looked at me and with utter disgust he said, “Mom, you are no good for anybody like this. You aren’t good for yourself, you aren’t good for us, and you are terrible at being an adult. Get yourself up and get yourself together!” There were some other choice phrases he threw in, and if he hadn’t thrown those in, maybe I wouldn’t have gotten up, but for the purpose of keeping this a “clean” story I won’t put them here. Instead of getting up and getting my life together, I decided to throw a pity party. I cried for three days.

At the end of those three days, I went and applied at a bar. I knew I had to quit drinking. I didn’t think I was an alcoholic, but I knew I was drinking to drown my pain and it wasn’t working. I figured I would just start working as much as possible and then I could get us out of the house we were in and I could start making things better, financially at least. I hated the bar, but for the first two months I made some pretty good tips and the kids and I started to repair the damage the last few years had done to our family. I wasn’t drinking and I felt healthier, but my heart still hurt too much to be able to handle much adulting.

I became a hermit. I cut off all the people I’d met in the last couple of years and became friends with anybody I could from Netflix. I find it comical now because if someone asks me if I want to “Netflix and chill” my answer is, “I’ve already seen Netflix.” And then I run away from them because Netflix and chill is just the modern day way of asking if you want to hookup. I did not. I just wanted to be left alone.

I started reading books on how to heal from a relationship you didn’t want to be out of. I started reading books about why women choose men who are emotionally unavailable. I started reading articles about people who don’t have families. I just started reading, watching Netflix and surfing Facebook. I became addicted to Pinterest and decided to start doing projects to make myself feel better. I never had time because I worked too much, and my kids were still suffering.  I didn’t know yet that I couldn’t give them something I didn’t have. I was doing better, but only on the outside.      

 I quit the bar when school started and just worked at school and the job I hated. I just wanted to see the numbers in my account grow and have enough to pay our measly bills and then buy some stuff for my kids to apologize for being such a waste of a mother the last year and a half. No matter what I bought nothing seemed to get better and something always seemed to happen so that I wasn’t making any progress. Some of the books I read had some of the stupidest advice, but I’d find just enough to make a connection to something I’d been doing and change just a little at a time. Sometimes, it was not much at all, but I felt better for at least looking for answers.

A few months later, my sons came home from work on a Saturday with a box. Zeb had started working for the same company Corbin worked for and they frequently rode together because Corbin had inherited the family gene of buying lemon cars that never stayed running. The look on their faces was expectant and hopeful. Corbin and I hadn’t gotten along that great since the revelation of his becoming a dad and so I got excited pretty quickly when he said, “We got something for you.” He opened the box and as soon as I saw the post it note on the book in his hand I knew where it had come from. I asked, “Why does that have my dad’s handwriting on it?” Corbin said, “How’d you know that?” I said, “Corbin, I’d know that writing anywhere. What is going on?”

He handed me the book and inside was a note from my dad. He talked about how much I loved to read and that he and the boys had been talking about the show Fixer Upper and it was mentioned that it was my favorite. Dad had ordered me a copy of Chip and Joanna Gaines book and told the boys to bring it to me. I started to cry, and Corbin sat down and put his arm around me. He said, “Momma, do you think you might want to call him?” It had been 16 years since I’d spoken to my dad, with the exception of at his mother’s funeral. I didn’t know how to talk to him, and I wasn’t really sure that Dad would want to talk to me. The boys looked so hopeful and so anxious I told them I would think about it.

I ended up calling and talking to Dad. I don’t know if he was surprised to hear from me, but he told me how proud he was of my boys and what good work ethic they had. It was a good conversation. A few weeks later we talked again, and Dad offered me a part time job at the same company my sons worked for. Not because he needed the help or because I needed the money, but I think both of us wanted to see if we could salvage our relationship at all. Or maybe there was nothing to salvage, but we might be able to build something new. I began to really enjoy spending time with Dad, and I was able to talk to him about my kids at school. He asked a lot of questions and seemed very interested in my work.

When I found Wholeness by Touré Roberts, Dad and I had just had a conversation about anger. He didn’t know how to get rid of his either. We connected in not knowing how to not be angry…and I was a little relieved to find out that I was more like my dad in that respect than I was my mother. I told him my fear of turning into her and he told me that I wasn’t. I honestly believed him. So, I started searching for the answers for both of us.  I knew that Dad couldn’t give me an answer he didn’t have and I thought maybe if I could figure this out, I could get a parent that loved me and maybe I could start to heal and not hurt so much all the time. As arrogant as that was, I began my search that led me straight into the arms of a Father who did love me. Somehow, I ended up being able to sing “Take Me to Church” and coming out with life instead of the “deathless death” of an existence that I’d settled for. That song is just a reminder now of how far God has brought me…I may still be the giggle at a funeral, but I am becoming comfortable in being different. I wasn’t made to fit in and I wasn’t made to seek approval from anyone but Him. I found something unexpected in the blank space between the lyrics of “Take Me to Church”. I found my freedom.

Proverbs 16:33 “We may throw the dice, but the Lord determines how they fall.”