Monday, June 15, 2015

On being in hiding

I think maybe it hit me last night, as I socialized with people in real life for the first time in a long time.  I smiled and joked and sometimes even said a few brutally honest words about my desperation to leave this region. But for the most part, I hid behind a polite smile and pretended that my world continues revolving around its old axis: piety and church involvement.  But that all obscures the reality: my world has fallen apart. 

I am tired and sad and so very lonely.  I am trapped and free all at the same time.  I can't bear the people with whom I once surrounded myself and I miss them desperately all at the same time.

They say you can't walk the Christian journey alone. They are so right. 

Maybe it happened when she who is supposed to represent love told my husband and I to "have a nice life." Maybe it happened when I sat through yet another communion service alone.  

But maybe it was the more continual reminders week after week that you can "know" people and not truly be known or know at all.  Familiar faces often produce the most aching of all loneliness.  But suddenly those people who have constituted my world here in the South were all gone.  Moving away, drifting away, running away.  No more Saturday night church, no more game night get togethers, no more casual evenings eating out.  Fragmentation and the continual comings and goings of life in a military town took their terrible toll. Meanwhile those with roots here treated me as an outsider, because that is what I am here.

That's all I have wanted to be.

And this is where the story gets complicated. How can I expect them to love me when I hold myself at a distance? How can I do anything but when my very foundation is built on a different material?  I struggle to hide what makes me me, and it tears me apart from the inside out until one day my husband is deployed, my friends are all gone or in the process of checking out, and I am utterly isolated.  

It isn't a pity party, and yet that is exactly what it is.  Exactly.  

It is hard these days to summon the energy to try again.  I want so desperately to sign up for a small group at my new church, but I am terrified.  Terrified that who I am with all my craziness isn't enough, that I will destroy more than I build.  

And so I hide.  I hide away where no one can find me, where I can't hurt them, where they can't hurt me, and I desperately pray that God will show me how to find the light again.

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