Exposing Myself

So a new friend asked why I don't write anymore. I explained that I'd offended someone with my last post, and that had kind of scared me off of posting anything. She encouraged me and began convince me that my voice is something that needs to be heard, so I decided to write again. When I sat down with my journal the next day, I noticed the date, realizing that I hadn't written much at all in the last few months. Offending someone via the Interwebs wouldn't affect my personal scribblings, would it? Why did my dear, dear Diary miss out on all the fun?

Putting that aside, I began to write about where I'd been over the previous few months. Then I stopped. I had to... because I couldn't see. As I had begun to write, I had also begun to lose the figure-4 variation choke hold I had on my emotions.

Introspection was hard, painful, and unexpectedly undesirable (#1). That's the first part of a single truth.

In photography, opening the shutter lets light in, inevitably causing its contact with the film (or something like that). The letting in of light is called "exposure." So I'm trying this whole thing again: I'm letting light in, and I'm looking at what I can see.

Stark naked, armor and pretentious garments trailing somewhere in the dust, limping and running and falling and failing and getting up again - I'm letting the light in. I'm exposing myself. Enjoy the pun before you go on.

It has been a little rough lately.... Okay, a lot rough. But it's also been meaningful, and it has borne much fruit. Recently I had to make a remarkably difficult decision, and I simply lacked the discernment to know the way that I should go. It took someone who has the spiritual gift that Paul called "seeing through the bullshit" (I think it's in Second Romans) to point me in the right direction. She saw weaknesses and wounds and salves for those wounds and workouts for those weaknesses that I would already have been aware of if I had been letting light in so God could illuminate the parts of my soul I was hiding - even hiding from myself.

Not looking isn't going to stop me from hurting (as least, not for long). It's just going to leave me ill-prepared for the mornings when I wake up and everything is so dark I don't want to put me feet on the floor, or for the days that seem so bright until I learn something that knocks me right back off of those feet. So I'm looking, and I'm learning. And I'm seeing those flaws and failures and other words that allow for alliteration. And with help I'm also seeing victories, and progress, and that my heart seeks to know fully and love passionately both God and people.

The second half of that truth from earlier: Introspection is good, and meaningful, and spiritual, and necessary, and sometimes... sometimes it is sweet. Sometimes it serves those around me in ways I could never have planned or predicted because those ways are beyond my ways.

That makes it worth it to let the light in, the light that hurts and burns, but that cleans and shows shadows for what they are and let's me see the face of the One who was with me in the dark the entire time.