I read a story this morning, in a
magazine called The Sun. It was about a young woman just before and
years after her older sister disappeared at the age of 16. The
sister was found, years later, murdered.
The author expressed the
emptiness, regret, horror, fear, suspicion, danger, loss, fragility
of relationships – so perfectly to my own imagination it made me cry.
This had been my greatest fear. I didn't want to feel this.
More than 3/4s of my life I lived in
that fear – what happened in this fictional story could truly
happen to anyone. My mother was taken from me in my fearful,
terrorized imagination many times as a child. But not in reality.
My life has been filled with fear of the tragic taking someone from
me. My mother, my dad, my husband, my little children, my teenaged
children, my adult children, my grandchildren, my pets.
Writing
requires honesty, if you desire to share something meaningful. In the past, however, I haven't handled visits to my painful memories
very well. I thought perhaps I should avoid all thoughts of them. But, it
isn't honest to share a picture of joy and spiritual freedom with no
context. So, those painful fears are relevant. They are part of the
story, the “before” picture, truth. If I refuse to “go there”,
to recall what I've been delivered from... what I share will be as
superficial and shallow as a billboard picture of a beach vacation.
For many years, I believed that my fears and pain had to be
someone's “fault.” Someone was responsible, if not for a direct
action then for failing to take preventative measures. Blame was a
close friend to me for decades. It was assigned to whoever was
deemed the “root” of the pain I was experiencing. But, no one
was truly able to insulate me from every discomfort.
Most times,
the people I held accountable were doing the best they could, with no
desire to harm. They had no control of the neuroses that could grow from
nursing a tiny injury that I didn't seek to heal. Sometimes the
smallest event can spread like a crazed fracture in a plate of glass
tapped not so very hard but under just the right set of
circumstances.
Blame pours its inky black stain all over your
images of that person. You cover them so thoroughly that their image
no longer bears the truth. Nothing is able to shine through the
opaque covering of a handful of actions or decisions amidst millions
of intentions, actions and decisions that reveal the true character
and identity of the ones you blame.
So, while I must “go there”
and remember where I began, that pot of ink is a boundary. I have no
business opening it and no right to pour it over another. Yes, it
hurt. But mine is not a life of stagnant victimization. It's a life
of movement and growth, gaining strength and wisdom... which one
cannot do if she covers every flawed human being in her history with
the opaque black ink of blame. We are all flawed. Our decisions and
actions may tap on another's pane of glass. Some of these are our
children. If we teach them to blame, we help them to spill the ink,
grow their fears, hide from wisdom and live at the mercy of the
brokenness.
We aren't whitewashing anything, just recognizing that
the painful truths aren't the entire truth. Don't let your story end
with ink stained hands, ink covered relatives, and bitterness and
injury haunting you like wraiths. It isn't what God intended for
you.
