Tag: regrets

Focus on the Fruit

It’s no struggle to those in my inner circle that life is pretty much kicking my behind right now. Work is the toughest it’s been in my 12 years of working there. I leave frustrated, angry, and exhausted more days than not. Sleep is elusive (it’s 3 am right now) and there is something going on with my health that they haven’t quite figured out yet. If it wasn’t for Tim, my kids, my dogs, and my friends I’m not sure I’d be sane. Tim is quite literally my refuge each and every day – Tuesday I got out of the truck and walked straight into his arms crying. Those kinds of days can wear you down like nothing else.

Every now and then I get an urge to turn on a sermon and it gets stronger until I listen to it. Tuesday night there was no ignoring it. I don’t search for a specific one – I cue up the church I follow and hit play on whatever shows up first. As always, it was a message that I guess God knew I needed. It’s happened before but it never fails to amaze me.

The sermon was entitled “Don’t Tap Out, Tap In”. I’ve listened to it twice and have gotten something different out of it each time. The main thing being that in wrestling “tapping out” means “ok, I’ve had enough, let me up”. In life, as it wears us down we are inclined to tap out. Throw up our hands and say “I’ve had enough of _______(insert an area of life that is wearing you down)”. Being honest – that has been on my mind a lot lately in regards to work. Have I had enough? Is the stress on my body slowly killing me and taking me too early from my family? Am I happy? Am I fulfilled? Am I letting it take too much of my spirit?

Heavy questions. The pastor goes on to say that in life we have four things….fight, fire, a fence, and the future. The Devil is a quiet serpent that sneaks into those areas and moves us away from God and away from the life He has planned for us.

I live my life in a fight. Fighting to be good enough, fighting to do everything for everyone, fighting to protect my bosses bottom line due to a loyalty that runs deep, fighting to keep wayward employees on path and in processes that have been proven to work, fighting to not disappoint anyone….the list is long. That fight, and the anger it produces, keeps me from focusing on the fruit in my life. God knows how much more fruit I have in my life right now that I have had in years. I have a man that loves me, I have a home I love, I have children who are grown and make me proud every day, I have a new family that supports me in every way, and I have the ability to travel and to see the world…THAT list is long too.

But most days? What I talk about, what consumes me, is the fight. How I didn’t get enough done. How I failed to enforce processes that protect the company. How someone else’s mediocrity created more work for me and drove me crazy in the process. What I hear in my head over and over is I didn’t fight hard enough and thus I failed. I think the reason this sermon pulled me up so short is finally realizing that. Why am I allowing anything to steal my joy? Even a job I’d tell you on my worst days that I still love.

Enter the fence we all have. Otherwise known as boundaries depending on who is speaking. What I have to do now that I have had this realization is erect a fence. A TALL electric and barbed wire lined fence. Turn my eyes to the future and what I want from it and use that to put bull dogs along the fence and end the fight.

Here’s the hard part. Can I do that? Can I change course on 45 years of being a people pleasing perfectionist? I can’t help but think if God wanted me to receive this message and have these realizations that there is hope that I can. I know it’ll take a lot of work. It will take mentally slapping myself over and over again until I get it. It will take probably disappointing people who count on me but hoping they understand in the long run I’m better healthy than I ever could be as I am now. It’ll take prayer and a lot of faith in God’s plans for me.

If you know me, if you are close to me, don’t hesitate to tell me when the fight consumes me that I need to focus on my fruit. Kick my butt if you have to. It’ll take my village to change these habits but I need to change them. I can’t keep on as I am. Humans need sleep and food to be healthy and happy.

Blessings y’all – Amy

Reflections of a Wounded Heart

They say everything changes when you turn 40. Actually they say it all goes to hell in a hand basket. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Things droop that didn’t before, going to bed at 8 am no longer seems appalling, the eye doctor says the dreaded “bi-focal” word. You don’t FEEL 40, heck you don’t feel 30, but the number keeps climbing.

More importantly your perspective on many things changes. For some, it happens naturally and without pain. Maturity just grows along with the number of candles on your cake. For others, 🙋🏻‍♀️, it takes catastrophic events to shake them out of the protective bubble they have cast around themselves. While I wish dearly I had fallen into group “a” my life has always dictated I do things the hard way.

If you have known me long or been reading here you know I’ve been going through massive changes in my life. Some of my choosing but most, well, not. What I didn’t anticipate as I fought, scratched, clawed, disrespected, and basically did everything but throw myself in front of things beyond my control is that God was working. He was allowing me to screw up to the “nth” degree. On purpose. Letting me get to a place there was no light. No hope. No joy. No love. Nothing at all left of the stability I craved with every fiber of my being.

Before you jump ship saying He wouldn’t do that – hang on. God had been trying to get my attention for years. Aborted journals reflect that. Times I cried out but quickly “fixed” it myself attested to that. I am a “fixer”. There is nothing (so I thought) that I couldn’t analyze for all the possible negative outcomes and navigate myself or someone I loved out of danger. I mean c’mon. If you were dealing with a human that dumb wouldn’t you let them fall as far as they could before you showed them the way?

Not saying God has any such thoughts. But I certainly would have looked at me and say “you have fun with that let me know when you need real help”. Blessedly God has abundant mercy and grace. He is patient and knew long before I did that this dark season was coming. Sometimes I wish he had given me some warning but if I look back really hard I bet I can find the warnings I chose to ignore.

Recently a co-worker told me he’s finding many people our age running into self reflection. I can’t speak for anyone else but self reflection is putting it mildly. Self analysis, soul searching, self questioning, self correction, self remodeling…you get the idea. Coming face to face with every one of my imperfections and analyzing and agonizing over how I have handled some parts of my life. How it changed relationships in my past or present. How it passed down to my children. Who my own fears and insecurities erased from my life. It’s exhausting. I’m not a bad person – I know that – but I, like any human, have places I could have chosen a different path.

It would be easy to blame it all on the very broken environment I was raised in. And while the lions share of it belongs there (validated by the counselor) at some point I consciously or subconsciously made choices for my own protection from pain. I willingly tucked my family in closer than it should have been (to be healthy) because I was afraid the world would break the happiness I had found. I guarded the nest Fred and I created with the energy of a tiger protecting a steak. When I suffered the catastrophic loss of my husband I somehow pulled my children in CLOSER. Unknowingly stifling their growth and happiness.

Regardless of what anyone thinks not a single choice I have made has been with ill intention. Not one. I am discovering how very hard it is for others to know that. In a society where judging comes first and any sort of compassion and understanding comes second it appeared controlling. Only those closest to me, who know my purest heart, understand who I am. As I embrace the woman God intended me to be, and get the love I need from Him (where I should have gotten it all along), I am finding myself still battling stress and regrets but with a softer tongue and a self awareness that comes with maturity and being shaped by pain. I find myself understanding which wrong turns I took and how a different path would have landed a different outcome. I find myself letting my children know where I went wrong so they can avoid making the same painful mistakes. Fully understanding that in their young immaturity they’ll probably have to make them anyway but once a protective mother always a protective mother.

I say all this to say…take time for reflection. Allow God to speak to your heart and show you the way. If you are still young avoid youthful impatience in your choices. Be mindful of the longevity of adulthood and how lasting decisions really can be. But know that if you are nursing a wounded heart? God still has plans for you. He does for me and while I’m impatient to find out what they are I know it’ll happen on His time. And that I am learning in every second that I am waiting.

God Bless – Amy