What happens is not as important as how you react to what happens.

Another Sunday night in the south and rain is falling yet again, with the only really positive feeling whirling about the coldness in this room being that there is no need to awaken early in the morning. Another vacation that is not really a vacation at all but only time off from the ‘real’ job that brings home the bacon for the rest of the family who have made this house no longer my home – no longer my place of refuge from the draining effects of the everyday world, for it seems this place I long to call home is more draining than the demands of a merciless world.

It was not intended for man to be God…much less, one middle-aged woman. How did I come to this unwanted position that I would have never chosen for myself…rather it seems it has chosen me. Some sign, some faint glimmer of hope, that such sacrifice is facilitating something positive in the normally frighteningly dysfunctional lives of those who wrongly ‘worship’ me might make this high and lonely place atop this totem pole seem not so cold, but alas, I am denied this comfort. And even more horrifying is the thought that instead of turning the tide of this family’s hideous dysfunction, its unwitting and grossly unqualified ‘god’ is being swept along with it.

The boob tube is muttering its usual obscenities of immoralities and violence as I sit here not really hearing, but somehow feeling a need for noise, however senseless. Sitting here wondering why it seems that the more anxious a brain feels, the more it craves distraction – anything to keep it from hearing the silence within that would force it to listen. Does it shrink from listening because it fears what it may hear, or is it fear of what the hearing would demand? Is it easier to wallow in the familiarity of the unbearable discomfort of misery than to meet the uncertainty of the challenge that promises change – the challenge to grow, to persevere – the challenge to keep reaching…to keep seeking until the answer is found and the obstacle is overcome? Or is it a fear that it will hear nothing at all but the life-sucking vacuum of some empty silence – some dark, dead place where there are no answers at all?

I do not often use blogging as a forum for airing my personal trials and private struggles. I am disinclined to allow even serious inquirers, much less casual observers, into the inner recesses of my chaotic soul. But no one here knows me except a few with whom I trust with this glimpse into my dark and private places. The rest have most likely already moved on to more interesting accounts of those who still have lives of their own.

I am depressed. I am discouraged and weary and angry and afraid. I am in a place I do not pass through often. It is an uncomfortable place I wish not to remain in. And when I find my way out of this present darkness, I do not wish to return.