Reality Check
I think one of my greatest difficulties in life is the very simple task of accepting my life’s realities; the limitations set before me. I want it to look different, for them to be different, but it doesn’t and they don’t. My reality doesn’t include a family of my own, right now. It does not include an ideal career, right now.
My reality, my right now, is me picking guavas in the cold South African winter morning with women whose language I don’t speak. Filling their buckets with peel cracked fruit, juices oozing, fingers numb. My reality is holding someone else’s baby, yet no ones baby through the night, coaxing them to rest, grateful they don’t know the pains of their own reality…yet.
My reality is far from the dream I hope for.
My reality is anger is most often easier than love, heartache easier than hope, isolation easier than community.
I fight, I wrestle, I so often despise my reality. I try to change it, to make it yield to my passions, my desires. But reality is stronger, and I grow weary quick.
This was a journal entry I wrote earlier this month.
A couple weeks after writing this I took a walk in the guava fields (I have been living on a guava farm this month). I felt my “ribcage piercing inward” as Donald Miller would describe it and I let my tears find their way to the orchard’s roots. I told God how frustrated I was and what I would do different if I had the power.
Shame sunk in and made a home of my thoughts. I felt shame for wanting what I did not have, embarrassed because I must not be enough or not yet deserving. Shame, I felt it all over me and had to run to the guava fields to hide it.
I told him, God, sorry. Sorry because my prayer was selfish and redundant, but the only prayer I cared enough to pray.
That’s when I felt him whisper to me, whisper into my mind like a thought. He whispered words that suffocate shame, shaming shame itself. They were words that were so hope filled that I started to smile. They were good words, words I'd rather share in conversation.
So, ultimately, I’m accepting my reality and the limitations within it. I’m accepting it not in an attitude of defeat, but in understanding that arm wrestling reality will not change it. In no way am I becoming passive in regards to my future, in fact I’m dreaming even more of the future and constructing paths to reach my aspirations. But, reality doesn’t sadden me like it used to, in fact…I’m starting to like it. Yesterday, it made me laugh.
“The perception of meaning, as I see it, more specifically boils down to becoming aware of a possibility against the background of reality or, to express it in plain words, to becoming aware of what can be done about a given situation,”
– Viktor Frankl Man’s Search for Meaning
And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?
– Esther 4:14 (ESV)
“From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us.”
– Acts 17:26-27 (NIV)
