Eden’s Garden

I have come to realize that somehow life happens and there are times when certain things in life occur and at the time you can’t really comprehend what is going on and then it hits you.
Sometimes it feels like actual pain, your throat swells shut and you’re trying to breathe through a tube you swear has shrunk to the size of a straw, your chest tightens and a knot forms in your throat, you’re face gets hot and you feel the tears working so hard to escape your eyes. You fight it of course, and start swallowing incessantly, breathing deeper, opening your eyes to maximum capacity in an attempt to keep whatever emotion you’re feeling from escaping your body. But eventually you get tired of fighting it and the dam breaks down and rushing out comes you’re reaction. you realize that prior to this you’ve shut down and can’t really feel, anything. You’ve distracted yourself from reality in whatever way you can, all in an attempt to escape. You’ve filled you’re life up with things, work, partying, cleaning…whatever it is there are always things to do…but it always seems to hit you.

What hits you? well it could be anything, you realize you’re not the person you want to be, you don’t know what you believe, your grandmother is dieing, your friend was killed in a car wreck, you’ve been forgotten, you have no plans for the future, you really screwed things up in that relationship….how is it that we make it through these times and don’t really feel much, but then one day when we least expect it something triggers, and all the pain we’ve felt, the guilt, the fear, the hurt comes rushing out of us,leaving us feeling drained and  measuring up far shorter then we’d planned.

I had one of those days today, I was reading a book and in the end a girl dies in a car wreck she has major head trauma and her brain no longer responds to anything and she dies. This reminded me so much of an experience I had last year, when my friend was killed in a car wreck, I felt like i was experiencing the pain and shock for the first time again. I sat in my room wondering if it was because I didn’t live in the moment, if i’m being over emotional, or if its just natural. But how could it just be natural to fall apart? It made me wonder if maybe this happens because all those things I talked about, as humans we were never meant to experience, so when pain comes into our lives stealing from us goodness, we are at a loss for how to react. Maybe humans and pain were never meant to coexist.  Which I guess could leave us feeling hopeless since we obviously do experience pain.
I’ve come to realize in my limited experience that life is a series of actions and reactions. So in that we always have a choice, I guess I take comfort in the fact that no matter what happens I have a choice as to the way i’m going to react, the way i’m going to live, and ultimately the person i’m becoming. There is so much power and life in the fact that no matter what pain we endure we have the choice to forgive, we have the choice to turn around and instead of reacting with bitterness and hate, to react with love and compassion. In this we find the very foundation of hope.  there is something we can do
The stories that change, and inspire us are the ones where the mother forgives the man who killed her son, where the father welcomes home the son thats abandoned him, the man gives his life to save the person he didn’t even know, the child that respects his parents even though they are abusive.
This is the choice we face, the choice that manifests itself in small ways, but ultimately determines the outcome of humanity. That in the midst of the chaos, and carelessness, we have the ability to reverse the cycle of hurt. We possess somewhere in us the power to take all thats happened, all the pain, hurt guilt, hate, bitterness, and fear gather it up and with all the emotion and the reaction it provokes making the decision to use it in the reversal of the damage that has been done. To actually begin to cure the disease that we are a part of. This is the message of Jesus, that his kingdom is opposite of what we find ourselves in, its irrational, don’t repay evil with evil , its a concept so simple, but world changing.

So when it hits me, I want to be a person who takes all the energy and emotion it creates in me, and with that create something beautiful, instead of something equally as damaging as what caused the pain i experienced. This is moving creation forward to me, and bringing God’s kingdom here…thats all, getting late sorry if it’s scattered