for my entirely inflated sense of self-importance

Hindsight.  It's 20/20, they say.

They're right.

You don't really see the damage until it's too late, until you're living thousands of miles away and walking wounded.  You don't see it until several years later when the ramifications of your lack of courage make themselves abundantly clear in your emotional baggage.

You don't even wish you'd done things differently.  It happened, you let it happen, it has made you who you are.  Wounded or not, you know things now that you could not have known had you done things perfectly.  You do wish, though, that it didn't hurt so much.  You wish you didn't walk with your guard up, you wish you could let it down and just be.  And some day you hope you'll heal and that you will be whole again.

~~~

I walked into my Bellingham apartment late one night, just off work from an evening shift at Walmart.  I was living alone that summer, and I had no close friends in the city. 

I wondered that night if I was losing my mind.  Like really losing my mind.  I felt on the verge of snapping, for no real reason but for the loud conversation in my head.  I felt the tension of struggling to hold onto a healthy perspective of the world.  I felt myself losing that battle, even if only for brief moments

I talked to myself out loud a lot that summer.

I stayed "sane."

Barely.

~~~

My first year in St Marys was emotional hell.  I won't kid myself and say things are any better this year.  My challenges are different this year than they were last year, but they're still here.  They'll always be here.  I'll always be here, teetering between sanity and insanity, walking the fine line of thinking a lot but not too much.  I can't get out of my head; I have always lived there and it only gets more intense with each passing year.  God have mercy, I'm a crazy liberal conservative post-modern academic-drop-out soon-to-be-navy-wife can't-get-out-of-my-head girl with an entirely inflated sense of self-importance.

That last part hits the nail on the head.  Inflated sense of self-importance, indeed.

Does anyone really care, and should they care about what I think about church or God or any of it?  These things I rail against?  They reflect more on my emotional baggage and my scars than they do on reality.

~~~

There's this blog I follow off and on.  The woman is a talented writer and her ideas fascinated me for a time.  She had a terrible experience in fundamental Christianity growing up, and her blog is devoted to fighting off the demons of her past.  Everything she says makes logical sense, but it is also entirely tainted by her terrible experiences.  She is unable to see good in most everything, because she walks wounded.  It bleeds through everything.

And so I had to stop giving her voice any real authority, not because her story isn't incredibly important, but because it's just that: one story.

My story is just one story.  My experience of God is only one experience of God.  He's a big God.  I need to let Him be big.

~~~

I want to write a book.  I want to write a "spiritual memoir," as if it gets any more naval-gazing-y than that.

I don't, however, want to write a book as one wounded, as one lashing out at a world that doesn't understand her.

I want to write in a way that creates a space for the walking-wounded in our midst.  I want to write in a way that paves a way forward, in a way that brings the Kingdom of God to earth just a little bit more.

I want to breathe life, not throw punches.

I have always wanted to write, maybe now is the time, maybe it will prove not to be.  I feel so under-equipped in the "life experience" category to do this.  But I think it's time to try.  My job situation will likely be changing here in a couple months, and my love will be deployed this fall.  It's time to do something with my life.  

I've been sitting here in rural Georgia spinning my wheels in self-pity for far too long.