Okay, I admit it. I screwed up. One of the most important safeguards for me to have in this day-by-day saga of becoming is that I have brutally honest friends who will kick me in the butt me when I need it. When deciding to write this blog, I asked a couple of my closest, spiritually discerning girlfriends to look at each of my posts and keep me accountable to being transparent on here. I feel God has led me to share my struggles and my successes and failures with those who may be experiencing similar difficulties and joys.
My number one reviewer (and butt-kicker) is my spiritual director and dear, dear friend. After reading my last post, my friend promptly and deftly delivered said butt-kick. Her words were something along the lines of "Your post is rather tame. It doesn't accurately portray your struggle with all that's happened and all that God has told you. I believe since you know you now have an audience to your blog, you're slipping into making what you write palatable. If that's the direction you're going, you should stop writing." Ouch.
Once I pulled her foot out of my ass, I had to admit she's right. Which is highly annoying. I don't believe I was consciously trying to be deceptive in my last post, but I condensed it into this nice, neat little package and made it appear that I'm now skipping carefree through the wildflowers, sure of where I'm going and who I am becoming. That I'm anticipating with bated breath the wonderful joys that being present in my home will bring. No way. Such is not the case. This trying to hear God, my "becoming", has been, and is, and will continue to be, a huge struggle. I'm a natural fighter (due both to my lawyerly training as well as being a hybrid middle/first child), an obstinate mule even, and I don't change my direction without a helluva lot of convincing that my direction is wrong and someone else's is right. I detest being wrong. I like to win, plain and simple, which makes me a damn good attorney.
So . . . please allow me to back up and take off the mask of "everything's okie dokie" and "I'm so happy to be going down this blissful road of motherhood and wifedom," and show you what's really been going on in this chick's head . . . and heart.
When God took off His kid-gloves and nailed me, so to speak, it was ugly. I mean nasty ugly. See, my friend has every right to kick me in the butt because she knows the truth. In fact, God's words for me first came to her in the form of a horrific, yet cautionary, dream. And these words of His crushed MY plans for my life, the dream I had worked toward attaining, finally finding approval from others & feeling "important" and liked. I couldn't believe it; I didn't want to believe it. For days, I refused to believe it. Instead, I looked for every angle possible that could get me around throwing off my plans and quitting my ascent to the top, and going with God's yet-to-be-revealed-how-to-get-to-His-better-place-for-me plan.
Honestly, it really pissed me off that God would do such a thing as to yank the carpet out from under my feet. And it pissed me off that my friend had the audacity to tell me that God is smarter than I am, that He actually knows me better than I know myself and knows what I'm letting myself get into. But, then again, He is GOD. And she is a trusted friend who is obedient to speaking the truth in love. In the end, through clenched teeth and fists, I quit the SA race.
I cried virtually non-stop for a week. (And my friend tells me she did too). Those of you who know me know that I do NOT cry. I don't have a reputation of being an emotional beast. Yet, I bawled like a baby. How dare He do this to me! I fought vehemently with Him for days. Heck, I'm still fighting to some degree. How could it be that where I was headed was wrong?! After all, I looked at being SA as a form of ministry. I would be helping so many people. In what position would I ever find more broken and needy people? And, darn it, it just wasn't FAIR. I had spent years with this goal, dreaming of the day I could reach it. Plus, as a bonus, I'd get a hefty paycheck and retirement. I deserved this job!
Now the dream, let me tell you more about this dream. In a nutshell (though not a neatly packaged one), this dream depicted myself and my family at a time down the road should I continue my SA quest. It wasn't pretty. It was a bloody mess - literally. Lust won out over innocence. Evil prevailed. My family suffered . . . and the suffering was brought on by my decision to continue my SA race. How important was this race to me? If I won, would I really have "won" if I lost everything good and true and lovely and pure?
At the time of its initial telling, I believed the evil depicted in the dream oozed out from other people in my life and politics in general. I wanted to believe that I was saving my family, that they needed ME to rescue them from the Darkness. Sounds valiant, huh? Instead, I've discovered the dream actually revealed the icky, yucky, bad gunk that was deep inside of my own soul. Really, who wants to face that stuff, to ADMIT its existence? I sure as hell didn't. I'm a good girl, remember?
Yet, over the past two months, God has graciously, though not painlessly, revealed so many ugly self-truths to me. I shared many in a previous post. At one of my small group studies just a few days after the hellacious revelation, the words of the author in our book study jumped out boldly at me, paraphrased as follows - "as ministers (which I considered myself to be should I have gotten the SA job), our first obligation is to minister to our own family". Holy cow! If I were to be SA, my husband would have, in all practicality, become a single parent and I would be taking care of everyone else's problems at the expense of my family. He has also shown me that His instruction for me to go home, to focus on what is important to Him, was not so much because my husband and kids needed me, as their spiritually superior wife & mother respectively, to save them from the big, bad devil, but more so because I needed to be saved from myself - my lust for worldly success, my pride, my sense of entitlement. And if I didn't stop my ridiculous self-aggrandizing quest, I would never hear God and never experience His best for me. And for what? Nothing of eternal value. Would I have gone to Hell if I had pushed ahead with my plan? No, I don't believe so. Would God have washed His hands of me? I don't believe He ever will, regardless of what fool thing I might pull. His Grace is beyond amazing.
Yet, I would have wasted so much time chasing earthly passions, earthly gains of money and position. And just how much time do I really have? There's only so much time to watch my babies grow up and to notice the day-to-day changes in their lives. There are only so many opportunities that my 17-year-old daughter gives me to see into her heart. I have to be present in order to accept and lay hold of these gifts. Heck, I never know when a God moment will occur, especially with my girl. Or where. The last time I was privileged to hear her soul speak, I had finally sunk down into a hot, lavender bubble bath after the boys had FINALLY gone to bed when I heard a tap-tap at the locked bathroom door. And know what? I wouldn't have missed it for the world. Yet, I almost had. I've been a fool for far too long. As always, God help me.
P.S.
As a clarification to my being present in my home, I am NOT leaving the practice of law. I am, however, limiting my representations to those cases that He has instructed me to keep - cases that allow for compassion and mercy.
