Clearing the path...

Hey all. Are you ready for a really vague, obnoxiously heavy metaphor? Well then, I have the post for you! Please read on...

I've been struggling a lot lately with something occurring in my personal life...or my work life. It's hard to tell because they are so heavily intertwined in the position I have. And I realize its basically the same struggle I often have when anything hard passes in front of me. I've mentioned before that I far prefer the path of least resistance. But somehow or another, I always end up inadvertently choosing the other path--you know, the one with all the thorns and scary trees that look like they are watching you? Yeah...I get myself in that neck of the woods a lot, I think.

Anyway, I won't go much into it because I rather like my job, and the people I work with, and moreover, I NEED my job. Let me just say that there is an issue that I feel I MUST take on. It is a fight that isn't necessarily "my fight," but I understood the Spirit when it spoke and said, "It isn't enough. It isn't enough to sit back and be sorry for those who hurt."

I feel that God advocates for women.
I feel it is important for me to advocate for women.
More than that, I feel that God expects me to advocate for women.
Especially in this instance.

But sometimes doing what is right (even what seems right all the way to the core of your being) is really hard, and it seems like you're walking in a forest all by yourself late at night and there is an owl hooting and rustling footsteps in the leaves behind you and faces in the trees, and all you want is to get back on that path with the street lights and the friendly houses along the way and forget that there is a harder path that you could be making less scary for other people who will come after you...and...and...

And then, when you're asking God to be able to let it go, to just be able to sit back and watch things play out, to let someone else take their machete and clean up that scary road for the other people that might have to travel that way...

Then, He calls you a coward. Clear as a bell, He aims a single word at you that is incomparably accurate,  and you know it's true. So you get up and quit crying in the fetal position because a raccoon is following you, and you start slicing away.

Where am I going with all of this? I'm not even sure...but this is my place where I can dump my feelings and feel a little better, even if it leaves the literally tens of tens of readers painfully confused. All I know is that I've found myself in a prickly situation, with no choice but to keep on fighting back at the thorns. And I may hack and hack and hack at all the vines and claw-like branches on that path only to turn around and see that everything has grown back and that the journey was only for me. But at least when it is time to meet my Maker, "coward" may no longer be the most apt description for me. And, you know, that's always a good thing.

Wishing you peace! (And maybe wishing for a little for me too...)






P.S. Sorry for the bizarre, insanely vague nature of this post. This was simply one of those posts that was "for me." There are some "real" posts coming up soon. I have been working on a couple of tutorials for y'all and fall just gets me going...makes me want to write and craft and cook and spread happiness everywhere I go. So hopefully there will be a little more happening in this little corner of the inter-web. I'll try not to beat you over the head with more metaphorical ambiguities in the near future. :)