A few Augusts have past now, and here I am again. Sitting on this same swing, different age, different life looking into the same panorama. A few things accomplished, a different life lived, but a heart a heart that is the same. Needing the same things, wanting the same things, hurting from the same type of wounds, but wanting the same things, just more aged. More weathered, more aware.
The hardest thing about growing older is adjusting to the loss of fantasies. I idealized love, career, relationships, anything that had to with what I wanted. The perfect man, the perfect friends, the perfect career. I could do it all. I could MAKE it all. It had almost escaped once, but be damned if it was going to again. He was going to be perfect or I wouldn't love him. I was going to be perfect or it meant it wasn't right. They were going to be perfect or I was going to walk away. The perfect job, or walking. Same thing. I had been burned so badly before, how could I trust anything but perfection?
Then it all came crashing in. Like a tidal wave of truth, every hope that was false was brought tumbling down. He wasn't perfect. In fact, he could hurt me... bad. Real bad. The perfect friends succumb to life and failed. The career deserted me for someone better, smarter... Everything ended. Everything that was supposed to be better so I could trust it. So it was different than it had been before... but people fail, I failed, they failed. I got hurt, they got hurt.
How do you reconcile that? How do you ask the Lord to make it up a second time? A third time? A fourth time...
But then He does. Not by the way you think, but something different this time. Reality this time. Harsh, ugly, beautiful reality.
I began to realize people would never change. I couldn't change them, much less me. We would always be imperfect. They would hurt me. I would hurt them. This one, this one that I loved, this one I thought was perfect, that I trusted because he was so unlike what I had known before, he was a human. He actually sucked at times. But wait, that didn't mean I couldn't love him, in fact, that meant something different. It meant I could love him. It meant the only one that could love him was the one that had learned him... me. The Lord had taught me him and I had learned his foibles and uglies and beauties.... and I loved him because of them. It was freeing. It didn't mean I was failing, that I was making a bad decision again. It meant I was growing up. Becoming a woman choosing something that was could even in its imperfection. It meant I could be loved and deserved to be loved in mine as well.
REally? Could it be that true? Could I let go to love enough to know it would never be "perfect" but it would be perfect in its imperfection? It would be perfect because it was messy, ugly, hard, contentious and scary at times? Could that mean it was right?
Thank you Lord, at times you bring a sword and not peace. You come to change and bring right round again in a different beautiful way.
You are the swing I sit on...
