shenanyagans

I sat in my bed this morning, just thinking and thinking, trying my hardest to think of something to blog about today. Nothing was coming to me and I was getting frustrated. I thought to myself, “I just don’t have it in me today.”.

But I couldn’t accept that. The thoughts started swirling in my head. “I can’t go another three days without posting, I’ll never build an audience that way.” “A good blogger wouldn’t have this much trouble coming up with things to write about.” “I’ve only been at this thing for a month, if I’m out of material already, what am I going to do another month from now?”

The thought of letting other people down is one that paralyzes me. It applies to everything I do. No matter what anyone asks of me, I am almost incapable of saying “no”. I will push back the things I need to do for myself, stay up all night working, and stretch myself ridiculously thin just to keep from disappointing someone. And Lord help me, if it’s anything less than perfect when I’m done, I’ll be sick about it for weeks.

A few years ago, I finally reached a breaking point. I had taken on multiple jobs for my church, several responsibilities for an organization in town, and a part-time job. It seemed that every one of them reached their busiest stage all at the same time, and I came very close to having a nervous breakdown. And for what? So I wouldn’t have to tell any of them “no”.

Maybe it’s because I want someone to appreciate my hard work. Maybe it’s because I, selfishly, would like a tiny pat on the back for once. Maybe I want people to like me. Maybe it’s because I still haven’t figured out what it is I’m supposed to be doing with my life, and if I just keep doing everything no one will notice that I have no real purpose.

Maybe it’s all of the above.

What I am learning now, is that the end result of trying to do everything for everyone is anything but positive. I always end up stressed, worried about failing, and letting everything else in my life suffer. And, more often than not, it just teaches people to take advantage of me because they know I’ll do anything they ask.

In the past year, due to circumstances beyond my control, I have finally started to get more comfortable with the word “no”. I have used it often, with great benefit to my mental health. Most people accept it and move on, but I have encountered a few who take my, “I just can’t do it this time,” and translate it into, “I’m incapable of ever doing anything for you again,” and left me flapping in the wind because I am no longer useful to them.

My worst fear, completely realized.

But through all of that, I have also become increasingly aware of who my real friends are, and what things I actually enjoy doing, versus those I was just doing because people kept asking. It’s a refreshing sense of clarity that I have not experienced up until this point in my life, and it will only improve as I continue to learn when to say “no”.

So I’m sorry, dear blog readers, I just don’t have it in me today.

I had a day last week when I was so stressed out, I had to get out of the house. The Canadian wasn’t home, so I had the boys here and my only option for escape was a few minutes alone on the back porch. It didn’t matter that it was 107 degrees, I just needed to get away. As I sat there stewing over things, a million different things running through my head, a familiar smell passed by with the breeze.

It was only for a brief moment, but it was immediately recognizable. Honeysuckle. As soon as it hit my nose I was instantly taken back to my grandparents’ yard when I was young. When I closed my eyes, I could see that honeysuckle bush so vividly I was sure I could reach out and touch it. I remembered playing in the yard, stealing fresh cherries off the tree, sitting on the porch swing eating chocolate ice cream with Grandpa Mc., and sneaking into the giant culvert that I never quite had the courage to go all the way through. For a few fleeting seconds, I was there again and the stress just melted away.

There’s only one other smell that can transport me to a place like that. Most people wouldn’t find it very pleasant, but the scent of a mothball takes me back to Poppy’s attic, looking through boxes of treasures, hearing her stories about each one, and even having her pry my head out from between the bars on the stair rail with an aluminum pie plate. I still chuckle when I remember her trying not to laugh as she scolded me for sticking my head through there. I think of sitting on her lap telling her stories, sneaking up those rickety outdoor stairs, and watching her make noodles from scratch. One whiff of that scent, and I’m a kid all over again.

It goes both ways, of course. There are some smells that bring back less than pleasant memories. The smell of a fire, for instance, puts me right back in an apartment complex parking lot, watching our home burn. The stench of mildew sends me back to our flooded apartment, sorting through the clothes we could salvage from our closet. The undeniable scent of freshly cut trees and newly plowed dirt takes me to that moment when I stepped out of the cellar on May 3rd of 1999 to find the town ripped apart. But fortunately, more often than not, the smells that carry me away are reminders of happier times.

It’s amazing, really, how powerful a smell can be. For me, not even a photograph can elicit such vivid memories and, as silly as it may sound, I am so thankful for that. Photographs can be destroyed in countless ways, I’ve lost them to fires, floods, and a tornado. Trinkets and special treasures are susceptible to the same fate. But a smell, each and every time you come across it, can so quickly flood you with memories that it overwhelms you and takes you back to a better time. That’s a wonderful thing, because some days, when the stress is more than you can bear, you just want to be anywhere but here.

I wear my Oklahoma State University class ring every day. It’s on my finger just as often as my wedding ring and I rarely leave the house without either of them. While my wedding ring symbolizes the same thing it did 13 years ago, what my class ring symbolizes has changed as the years have passed.

When I bought my class ring, I was a senior at OSU. I was excited to be graduating soon, looking forward to using my degree to land that dream job in the technical writing field. Or was it in publishing, or editing, or journalism? I wasn’t sure, but I was certain it would be an amazing career. I was ready to prove those people right who voted me “Most Likely to Succeed” in high school. That ring reminded me of the endless possibilities that lay ahead.

(By the way. Yearbook “Most Likelies”? Dumbest.idea.ever. But that’s a rant for another post.)

I graduated in December of 2000, which, unfortunately, also landed me in the job market in the middle of a recession. I remember waiting for a call telling me whether or not I got a job on the same day my husband had to go to work to find out whether or not he still had one. It was a terrible time to be fresh out of college with no experience, as I competing for a small handful of jobs with newly unemployed veterans in the field. I searched for two years with nothing more than a couple legitimate interviews, and no job offers. My ring that symbolized an exciting future before, now became a reminder of my frustration and discouragement.

In 2002, when we were more confident in the Canadian’s job security, we decided to start a family. As I went through two pregnancies, and swelled up to the size of three men, (I’m exaggerating…a little), my ring was stuffed away in a drawer somewhere. When we moved to our new home in 2003, it got buried a little deeper, and I didn’t see it for several years. Fine by me. I didn’t like the way it mocked me every time I looked at it.

Just a few years ago, I was digging through a box and my ring resurfaced. In the back of my mind I had assumed it was lost, so I was really excited to see it again. I took it out of its box and slid it right back on my finger as though it had never been missing. But as I twirled it around my finger, examining each little detail, my excitement was immediately replaced by a knot in the pit of my stomach. It was almost a decade since I had graduated and I still had no career. Sure, I had done plenty of work for people, none of whom deemed it worthy of a paycheck, but I had never even had a real job. That ring had become a symbol of my complete failure.

It took me a very long time to get past the idea that I had failed. I still struggle with it today. I’m not a highly paid writer or editor, I’m not even an established freelancer. Even though I am completely capable of professional level work, people still view me as the kid from a small town who could whip up a nice little poster if they need it, for free of course. There are days when I still feel as though the four and a half years I spent in college were for nothing.

There are other days, however, when I am able to look at that ring and appreciate the part of my life it symbolizes and how those years helped shape the person I am today. College teaches you so much more than a profession, it molds you and stretches you and prepares you to face life in the real world, even if that world may not ever involve your dream “career” by definition.

Today I am a stay-at-home mom. I have been for almost 9 years. I have two amazing boys that I have been able to spend every day with. They are incredible little human beings and I am in charge of making sure they are guided in the right direction and encouraged to pursue their dreams. I could view myself as an unemployed college graduate who just happens to be a mom, I could see that as a failure, and I’m sure many of the people I grew up with do think I’ve failed. But I choose to view myself as a daughter, a wife, a mother and a friend who just happens to have a college degree. Those things may not provide a paycheck, but they are the most important titles in the world, and failure is not in the job description.

Ready for a good laugh? These are our family portraits, as drawn by Roenick.

Starting from the top left, moving clockwise, they are The Canadian, myself, my mom, and my dad. Obvious lesson? Never ask an 8-year-old to draw your portrait.

I have the picture of The Canadian as the caller ID for him on my phone. It has been there for months, and I still have a hard time answering when he calls because I’m laughing too hard to talk. My picture, on the other hand, doesn’t make me laugh because that double chin is a little too accurate for my liking.

They always say if you want an honest answer, to ask a child. That keeps playing on repeat in my head as I wonder if that’s how the rest of the world sees me. It’s all fun and games when it’s everyone else’s pictures, I mean come on, they’re hilarious. But mine? Not so much.

I’m sort of kidding, of course. I can’t help but laugh when I look at the way he drew me. I spend a lot of time worrying about the way I look, or at least the way I look to others, I’ll probably never be happy with myself. And it’s not just about appearance, it’s the way they view me in general that I’m constantly concerned with. What if I mess up? What if I do something wrong and they all laugh at me?

Guess what? I will mess up,  I will do something wrong and, yes, sometimes people will laugh at me. The important thing is that I can laugh along with them. Instead of fearing my mistakes, I want to learn to be okay with making them in the first place, learn from them what I can, and be able to sit back and have a healthy chortle (people just don’t use that word enough) over it all.

I’m finding that the more I write about my insecurities, the more I hear from others who struggle with the same issues. It’s funny how we’re all so worried that “everyone else” will find out we have the same problems as “everyone else”. I don’t know about you, but I say it’s time to come out of hiding and laugh about it all, together.

My mom and I can find the humor in just about anything. Call it a coping mechanism, if you will, but we aren’t big fans of being down and depressed for long, so if there’s a reason to laugh, we’ll find it. Hence the picture of mom, fresh off of chemo, looking at hair brushes in a beauty supply store. It was her idea to take it and send it to my sister, and we laughed so hard I’m surprised we didn’t get kicked out of the store.

As I was glancing through my pictures last week, I came across this one again and had a good chuckle. It’s such a silly image, but what struck me this time is how often we all must look that silly. No, not because we’re all balding and shopping for brushes, but because we’re always longing for, and downright desperate to have, things we just don’t need.

If you stop for just a moment, you can probably think of one or two things right now that you are just dying to have. Maybe it’s the newest Macbook Air, the latest iPhone, that Coach bag you’ve had your eye on, or that tiny 2-door sports car you’ve wanted since you were 16.

Now if you’re totally honest with yourself, how many of those things do you actually need? Do you need that new computer when you just bought one the last time the new one came out and you just had to have it? What’s wrong with the iPhone already in your pocket? Do you really need to spend $500 on a purse just to have that logo on the outside of it? And you know deep down inside that that’s a completely impractical car that won’t even make it over the dirt roads to your house. (What? That’s a real concern out here in the boonies! And trust me, you won’t look so cool when you’re high-centered on a sand rock, waiting for a tow tractor truck.)

Those are all fairly large purchases, and most of us aren’t able to just go out and splurge on things like that. But realistically, we convince ourselves we need a lot of things that we really could live without. Even worse, we often spend a lot of time praying (more like begging) for those things. And then to top it all off, we spend even more time being angry with God when he doesn’t “provide” as we are so often reminded He does.

But the fact is, “the Lord will provide” does not mean “the Lord will grant your wishes”. We can pray and beg and pester and whine all we want, but expecting Him to provide things that we just don’t need is not only a waste of time, but it’s the very definition of selfishness. It leads to disappointment, misery and, ultimately, a very disillusioned image of God.

Sure, we all want to have the finer things in life, there’s nothing wrong with that, and we enjoy them when we have them, but those things don’t bring true happiness. No, that happiness is found when we take stock of what God has provided for us and learn to be content. When we stop obsessing over what we want and find satisfaction in what we have, we are finally able to see our real needs as they arise. And when we pray about those needs and begin to see those prayers answered, we can finally appreciate the fact that He truly does “provide”, just as He promised. Contentment and trust in Him beat an iPhone any day.

Take a moment today to reevaluate your “wants”, be thankful for your “haves”, and refocus your prayers on your “needs”. Life is so much more enjoyable when you stop trying to brush your bald head.

All of my life I have heard parents of multiple children say their kids are total opposites, but until I had two of my own I never understood just how extreme those differences could be. I’m not even sure phrases like “as different as night and day” and “polar opposites” even do it justice.

This picture couldn’t be a more perfect example of their personalities. Roenick is my serious one, always in deep thought or having a long conversation with any adult who will sit still and listen. Declan, on the other hand, is my free spirit, constantly on the move, always building something, getting dirty, or playing pranks on anyone who will fall for it.

They are both happy little guys, but Dex knows how to have fun, and I mean real fun, the kind of fun that’s spontaneous and leaves him giggling so hard he collapses to the ground grabbing his sides as he gasps for air. Roenick, on the other hand, has to schedule fun, plan it in detail, and misses out on half of it while he’s making sure everything goes according to said plan.

The problem is, Roenick is like an adult trapped in a tiny little 8-year-old body. He’s happiest hanging out and talking with grown-ups because that’s who his thought process most resembles. He spends most of his time trying to act like one of us, and that’s unfortunate because, quite frankly, most of us “grown-ups” have forgotten how to have fun. We spend most of our time trying to act like someone we aren’t, and scrambling to live up to the expectations others have of us.

Dex spends his time being whoever he wants to be, whenever he feels like it. One day he’s a breakdancing hip-hop star, the next he may be a soldier, and he might follow that up with an undercover agent posing as a cowboy. But no matter who he is at any given moment, you can bet he’s having a blast.

I know the reality is, as adults, we do have to have our moments of acting responsible and being the person we are expected to be. We can’t go around doing whatever we want whenever we choose, and that’s just an unfortunate part of life. But I guarantee we could be doing it a lot more often than we are now.

Dex inspires me to put aside the things that can be done later, to stop worrying about the laundry or the finances for a few minutes and just be a kid again. And lately I’ve noticed that those grown-up things are a lot easier to come back to when I’ve allowed myself to have a little fun.

Right now it’s Friday, 5pm is fast approaching and we can almost see the weekend. I hope you’ll take Declan’s lead and get out there and have some real fun. I promise Monday morning will be a lot easier to face if you do!

Not long ago, I was standing in the back yard watching my boys play. I was walking around the perimeter of the yard, examining the aging wood privacy fence, looking at the missing nails and cracks that needed to be repaired. I came upon a board with a knothole in it, and tapped it with my finger. The center of it was loose, so I tapped it again, this time a little harder, and the knot popped right out into my hand, leaving behind a perfect little peephole. I couldn’t resist the urge to look through it, so I stood on my tippy toes and stretched my neck up as far as I could. But it was too high, and no matter how hard I tried I couldn’t even catch a glimpse of the view through the hole.

I don’t know why, but I just had to see through that hole. So I slid my cell phone out of my pocket, raised it up to the peephole and blindly snapped a photo.

I was surprised by how beautiful the sunset was on the other side of the fence. Directly above me was nothing but steel gray clouds, lovely in their own right, but nothing particularly special. But beyond the boundary of the fence was the real beauty, the vivid purples and pinks, the stark silhouette of the trees against the fiery orange along the horizon and the last gleam of light as the day drew to a close. And to think, had I not looked beyond the fence, I would have missed that whole gorgeous display.

I have spent much of my life building fences, not physically, but emotionally. In part, it’s because I’m so afraid of what people will think of the real me, but it’s also out of fear that I won’t be successful in the world outside of the fence. I put up these boundaries because I can control what people see, I can control how much emotion I show, how much I open up to them and how intimately they get to know me. I can also control what I attempt to do. I know the things I am good at, I work at something until I perfect it once, and then I fence it in, just in case my next attempt wouldn’t turn out so well.

I’m afraid by doing so, I have missed the potential beauty of my life up to this point. Maybe shutting myself off has cost me meaningful, lifelong friendships. Perhaps being afraid to step out of my comfortable boundaries has kept me from becoming what I was supposed to be. What if I’ve protected myself for so long, that I’ve completely missed out on the best things life had to offer?

I could get swallowed up by the “what ifs”. And there are moments when I do allow them to eat me up inside. But allowing them to consume me is just wasting more time. I am 33 years old. Life isn’t over. And it’s not too late for me to just be getting started. I can take this realization and start really living, letting myself be me and working toward the dreams I fenced in years ago.

And I know I’m not the only one who has fenced myself in. I’ve seen so many others in my position, some who haven’t even let themselves notice the fence they’ve built around themselves. I know the loneliness and disappointment inside that fence, and, whether you’re 33 or 73, it’s time to leave it behind.

Forget the knothole, I’m ready to kick out a whole board and squeeze right through the fence. You do the same, and I’ll meet you on the outside.

Today’s post may be a repeat for those of you who were reading when I was posting at Testify blog. It was fresh on my mind today, as my mom had a check-up with her glaucoma surgeon yesterday. You’ll understand why when you read it.

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Once you’ve met me, it doesn’t take much time to discover that I’m a perfectionist.  That, in and of itself, isn’t necessarily a bad trait to have.  It usually means I pay extra attention to detail, and hold myself and my work to fairly high standards.  On the other hand, it typically means I don’t trust others to help me with much of anything.  I am of the opinion that if I want it done right, I have to do it myself.  I’m not really the “my way or the highway” type, but I usually know what way I think things ought to be done to achieve the result I’m expecting.

With that in mind, the past year has been a trying one for me.  On May 3rd of 2010, my mom broke a bone in her hand and, despite weeks of physical therapy and praying for a miracle, it never really healed and she has lost much of the normal function in that hand.  In August, just a few months later, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.  When she first told me she had found a lump in her breast and we were waiting for biopsy results, I prayed and prayed for a miracle.  She was expecting it to be cancer, but I begged God to just take it away, to let the biopsy show it was nothing more than a benign mass.  He didn’t.  October rolled around,  and while she was in the middle of chemotherapy treatments she suffered some complications with her vision and ended up, for all intents and purposes, blind.  Again, I begged and pleaded with God for a miracle.  I cried and I screamed and got on my knees and just asked him to restore her sight.  And again, He didn’t.

Three times in the span of a year I prayed for a miracle.  I prayed harder than I have ever prayed.  And in all honesty, I was angry.  I had never understood how people could be angry with God until that very moment when I was on my knees begging Him to just let my mom see.  After all she had already been through, didn’t she deserve that much?  I couldn’t help but think of how many times Jesus had healed the blind in the Bible.  I had all the faith in the world that He could heal her, but why wouldn’t He?

The problem was, I had placed my own limitations on Him.  I asked Him to do the miracles, but I had my own ideas about when and how they should happen.  You know, something along the lines of mom waking up one day with a fully functioning hand, no sign of cancer, and perfect vision.  That’s not asking much, right? And when weeks, and then months, went by without the results I expected, I assumed His answer was a big fat, “NO.”

Then one day, I heard my mom say she had been praying for a miracle for her vision.  She said she had asked for either an outright miracle, or one that would occur over time through the use of her doctors.  She didn’t care which, she just had faith that He would take care of her.  And in that moment, I realized how shortsighted I had been.

You see, even though Jesus healed many blind men, He didn’t always do it the same way.  He healed them purely by his touch (Matthew 20:29-34), by their own faith (Mark 10:46-52), and once with his own spit (Mark 8:22-26).  He even did that one in two steps!  All very different methods to achieve the same result of miraculous healing.

As I type this today, my mom is cancer free, and, through the results of two different surgical procedures, she can see.  It’s not perfect 20/20 vision, but she can see.  None of it happened overnight, none of it happened immediately after I prayed for it, but He gave us our miracles nonetheless.  Through His perfect methods and in His perfect timing.

I think we are all, at times, so blinded by our own expectations and solutions to our problems that we fail to see the miracles happening all around us.  It is my prayer that we’ll all learn to trust His methods and His timing, no matter our request, and that we’ll open our eyes and our hearts to be able to truly appreciate when those miracles come in unexpected ways.

This picture has absolutely nothing to do with this post, but with nothing but 100+ degree days on the forecast as far as the eye can see, we all just need something cool to look at.

Moving on.

Confession. I am a pessimist. I can spot the negative potential in any situation faster than you can blink. No matter what happens, my brain immediately starts processing the worst case scenario and it’s completely involuntary. I have to work, and work hard, to have a positive attitude about a lot of things. But I am working at it, and that’s a step in the right direction.

This blog has been a great exercise in positive thinking for me. If I wrote all the negative things going through my head at any given moment, this wouldn’t be a place where people like to read. I knew from the beginning that I had to look for the positive side of things if I wanted to write and keep my readers coming back. So far, just forcing myself to do that has had a tremendous impact on my attitude as a whole. Proof positive that you, and only you, have control over whether you choose to be happy or crappy, for lack of a better word.

I have been fairly successful, up to this point, at keeping things positive here at shenanyagans. But it’s summer break. My kids are sleeping in every day, waking up happy, and getting banished to the back yard when they start trying to kill each other. We eat when we want, spend our evenings however we choose, and if we want to go shopping at 11am on a Tuesday morning we are free to do so. For the time being, my surroundings make it easy for me to be happy and stay positive.

My worry is how I will be able to keep it up after the boys go back to school. Last year was miserable. I don’t need to go into details, but I have never been so excited to see a school year end. Things happened, I grew more and more frustrated with people who had the authority to make it better but were too indifferent, or lazy, or whatever, to do anything about it. The biases in a small town are infuriating, and it doesn’t take you long to figure out that if the kids who bully your child are from the “right” families, they’ll get away with it every.single.time.

But I digress.

My point is, the longer I had to deal with the whole situation, the worse my attitude got. By the end of the year, I was so angry that I couldn’t dig deep enough to find a positive thought anywhere in my head and it consumed me. Now, with school just a month away, I am literally starting to have nightmares about it. Just looking at a list of school supplies causes anxiety for me, and I can’t even let myself think about the first day of school.  I don’t want it to consume me this time. It’s a dark and miserable way to spend 9 months out of the year.

I know I’m not alone. While yours probably isn’t frustration with a school, it may be a stressful job, a group of condescending people at church, your so-called friends that constantly leave you out of their plans, or that family member that insists on calling to remind you how much better they are than you. It could be just about anything, but we all have our triggers that send us straight into negative thoughts and an overall bad attitude.

The key is how we choose to handle it. And it really is as simple as that. A choice. In my case, this year, with new administration at the school, I am choosing to be optimistic that things will be handled differently, and in the event that they are not, I have done my research and am confident that homeschooling is a viable option for us in the years to come. I won’t allow my children to be treated poorly, and I won’t allow myself to feel trapped in a situation that is no longer healthy for me or my kids. But first, I’m going into this new year with open eyes, looking for positive change, and it’s already improving my attitude.

So take control of those triggers that send you spinning into anxiety and darkness. Choose to look for the positive in every situation, even when it isn’t obvious, and decide when the negatives are worth fighting through and when it’s time to form your plan of escape. You’re attitude will get an instant facelift, and everyone around you will thank you for it.

Up until just a few years, this bridge stood on the south end of our little town. My family wasn’t really the Interstate type, we preferred the meandering secondary roads with a view, so we crossed that bridge many times most every week. I love old bridges anyway, simply because of their character, but this one was really part of my everyday life for many years.

When word got out that the bridge was going to be replaced, I was heartbroken. I knew the boring concrete bridge that would take it’s place would be nothing special, it wouldn’t have a history, no stories to tell and nothing to make it unique. But there’s not much you can do to stop a major construction project, so I managed to make my way underneath it for a few photos just days before they finally tore it down.

Years later, I still miss the old bridge every time I cross the new one, just like I knew I would. What I didn’t know, is how much I’d love the new one. After a lifetime of having to slow down for the sharp, bumpy curve that led into the old bridge, the new smooth, gently sloping hill that leads to the new one feels like an airport runway. It makes me want to drive so fast that I’m sure my car could take flight if it only had some wings. I don’t…always…but it’s fun to think about. The bridge is fresh and modern, and if I’m honest about it, brings the entrance to our town into the 21st century instead of making us look like we’re stuck decades in the past. Not only that, but once it was replaced, along with another nearby bridge just a few months later, the highway into town was finally suitable for large trucks and other traffic that could bring some life into our little part of the world. I may not have wanted the change, but, as it so often is, it was something that needed to be done.

Change is never easy, and rarely any fun. But it is necessary. Progress is impossible without change, and sometimes, no matter how desperately we want to hang onto the way things are, we have to let go for the sake of moving on to something better. It’s a lesson we have all learned over and over through the course of our lives, and one we have learned to deal with because we had no choice. Change is just a part of life we must accept.

What I have discovered recently is, it’s not the change itself that is the problem. The real difficulties come from the way we react to the change, and the hardest part to deal with is the fact that, more often than not, we will not all react to the same change in the same manner. I had a hard lesson on this very thing this past weekend. I have been leading a small group for a couple of years now, a group of what I considered some of my closest friends, the kind of friends you can be real and raw with about anything and everything. We were very tightly knit, and an incredible source of support for each other. But change happened. Some found support in other places, some found it easier to focus on themselves rather than try to encourage others, and some just experienced life changes that kept them from the group. I will admit I was a little heartbroken to see the group fall apart, but I prayed and prayed about it and finally came to terms with the fact that it was time to call it quits. I wrote a message to the group to explain, took two days to actually have the courage to send it, and waited for a response.

The response never came. I won’t lie to you, it hurt. It hurt to know that something I had poured my heart into for so long, and struggled so hard with ending, apparently didn’t mean as much to the others involved. They had obviously moved on long before I did.

But here’s the deal. Just because they didn’t react to the change the same way I did, doesn’t mean what we had together served no purpose. It may not have benefited every one of us, but for a couple of us it was life changing and I can honestly say I’m not sure where we’d be now if it hadn’t been for the support of that group. It may not be the outcome I had hoped for, but if that was all that came from our time together, it was worth every minute. It mattered to us, but I can’t make it matter to the rest of them.

The next time you are faced with change, and you will be, don’t let your knee-jerk reaction of resistance be the whole of your response. Take time to consider it, mourn over the way it was, or the good ol’ days, if you need to, but waste no time in looking for the positive possibilities to come. Only you can decide to make the best of it. But maybe even more importantly, don’t let the reaction of others lead you to doubt the value of what used to be. Just because they don’t mourn what used to be, does not mean what you had didn’t meet a need or serve a purpose, even if just for a few people. Take time to be thankful for what it accomplished, and look forward with optimism. There’s something better to come.