Reading

  • The Writings of the New Testament
  • The Pursuit of God - Tozer

Wednesday, June 21, 2006

People come and people go, they leave their imprints in ways that are unimaginable. People are like pictures, filled with thousands of details that go unseen to the glancing eye, that you will not see until you see them upside down or sideways or in twilight or dawn. certain colors that will only emmerge when you are looking for them, when you are in the right mood to notice.
we are enigmatic creatures with much lying beneath the surface of our every day lives. just think of all the thoughts you have that you don't tell anyone about, the absolute honest truth that you can't bare to tell another human being. the hurt or fear that you cannot bring yourself to admit.

we are islands in some ways. some of us are closer to shore than others but islands still the same.

i have realized recently that my school life and my real life are completely different worlds. i share the funny stories from the days but not the struggles, not the hard things kids face or have faced in life. and i could have had an absolutely painful day at school full of information from broken kids about horrible things they have endured and yet when someone outside of school asks how my day was i will say, "it was good." and almost mean it.

they are two different worlds and i'm sure many other people live in this way. i have to force myself to tell someone, to share the things that happened during the day or i could enter the habit of living two lives, of keeping half my life from people. i can understand why teachers marry other teachers because then at least that person understands all the intricacies of their spouses world, the unspoken yet understood aspects of life.

i don't want to be an island though, i don't want to build up the habit of keeping secrets from someone. not everyone needs to know and i realize that one person knowing is enough, but learning to share everything with someone seems weird. i often spread out myself amongst many people. one person knows this side, another person another side. but no one knows all sides. there are too many things in life that would be easy to keep as our secret thing, as our thing that keeps us a safe distance from other human beings. and it frightens me to think about being completely close to someone. i have recently been reminded how much broken relationships hurt and for 24 hours it stopped me dead in my tracks.

but i don't want that and need to fight against the temptation to seclude myself. it is a temptation. i think it is sin in my own life. the desire to distance myself from others rather than share my frustrations, short comings, anger, weakness with someone else. i also need to learn to share the good things, my quirks and funny things. it isn't God's desire to keep himself from us and i don't want it to be mine.

1 comment:

David Hengen said...

good post. it's not how i would have percieved it. i'm glad everyone is different.