Last year I wrote this post: 2007 – a bit about me. In the last few days I have been feeling an encouragement to share more about me.
This post contains the me-now bits, and the next post contains how I came to be me. I need to tread this area carefully because I don’t want to bring dis-honour to God, family, myself or the people who have been and are a part of my life. But I also know that people are very sensitive and can read non-existent things into any situation… so I can try all I want and yet still find someone offended.
In fact that happened this morning. I walked into a favorite hang out and a woman was gesticulating at me and at my bible and making comments to her husband, comments I could only slightly hear. Her husband was semi-smiling at me and calming her and telling her to “behave” in a gentle voice. She glared at me once or twice, but nothing too serious.
I don’t know what I did. Perhaps she just doesn’t like anyone who reads a bible? I’m not sure.
I have shared a lot about myself on this blog, so it’s hard to really get to grips with why God would encourage me to share more, but His ideas always work out well – sometimes with a bumpy ride at first – so here goes.
So what am I dealing with and struggling with?
All my major addictions appear to have ended, which is woohoo! I haven’t been in any form of counselling – other than having good friends! – for 18 months.
Praise God for what Jesus did on the cross – plus caring for myself and finding a community of caring people – because it is those three things that have healed me. That’s why I try to balance faith in Him with hope and love. And it’s also why the subtitle to my blog is “Loving God, loving others, loving self” because it took all three for me to recover to where I am.
Let’s see… what else can you expect to encounter that may confuse you in my behaviour? 🙂
I have a very clear idea of my destiny which I will never ever deviate from. I think it’s important for a man to know where he is headed and to be willing to stick to that dream, no matter what the cost. That makes him predictable to anyone who is willing to come alongside and listen and understand what he is doing. To everyone else, he is stubborn and inflexible. Oh well…
I recently walked past a person talking to another person and the snippet of the conversation that I heard the words “his defense mechanism is” and I spent many days wondering what my defense mechanism is. I think it is to say “No” to anything I find at all incompatible or confusing. So I’m kinda keen to watch the upcoming movie Yes Man just in case it inspires me to start saying yes more.
My destiny – and several components of it – was explained to me when I was very young, before things got so complicated. So I’m largely trying to follow the script outlined back then like a map, plus (praise God!) I have found another “map” that speaks to me very accurately and it dovetails brilliantly with what was said back then. What is this new map I found? Yes… the bible!
I used to pride myself on never forgetting a face, but also in this last two years I have struggled with what is called “face blindness“. That means that I struggle to tell who is who, sometimes. Ok, ok… a lot, actually. So, that may mean that you recognise me, and I should recognise you, but I don’t. (Changing hair or hair colors garuantees I won’t recognise you.) Don’t be put off, don’t take it personally… just come and talk to me, all the while forgiving me for temporarily not being able to place you in context. (I’m improving this by playing the Wii game called Find Mii and also Pose Mii.)
And sometimes I should look and connect but I don’t. Gah!!! Later in the day I kick myself, wishing I had been able to figure it all out in that split second.
I’m trying to follow God and I’m more able to tell Him apart from me and from the enemy – which is also woohoo! The bummer to hearing is that you have to listen and follow – and this could cause other people to get very very upset. But… I do it anyway. hehehe. 🙂
Until recently both of my ears were almost completely deaf – this started on a trip to Europe about 4 years ago – and in the last week I can hear completely in one ear and the other is in the process of recovering.
I don’t like heights, so any job I take and any place I stay needs to be on the ground floor. This is also something that appeared in the last year and is also slightly improved recently. What does that say about the last year?
My current fav song is “Beyoncé – If I Were A Boy” and my previous recent fav was/is “Lecrae – Send me“. Right now I am listening to Colbie Caillat – Bubbly.
I only very recently discovered that women find me attractive. Seriously, I really never knew that before. I wonder how many misunderstandings that is responsible for! 🙂
However, my ability to spontaneously read faces and emotions is still relatively limited, so I have little or no idea if your emotion (assuming you are a woman) is fear or attraction. I can read anger these days and some forms of flirting. It takes a while for me to figure it all out and by then it’s too late – I’m already in trouble or already in the wrong situation and I have to remove myself.
On the topic of women… understanding men and women has actually required several miracles of biblical proportions! Why? Well… there is hopes and dreams of the individual, then stir in the society expectations of roles for men and woman, then mix in the expectations of parents (and other well meaning meddlers), then let all of this settle for a season as you realize that there is also what real world people actually do (which is driven by emotions and needs) and finally sprinkle on top what the church teaches (and please note that doesn’t necessarily match the bible)… and kaboom! What do you have? A mess.
You can understand that I’m still percolating all of this… and as a result I frequently get things wrong, or stare too long, say the wrong things and get misunderstood.
I take comfort in this statement…
In an ABC interview, Michelle said that “Barack didn’t pledge riches, only a life that would be interesting. On that promise he’s delivered.” – Source
Meanwhile, with all of this personal growth going on, I’m blogging my past, attracting unwanted spiritual attention, running a business, writing about future stuff, feeding cats, putting up my home-made nativity scene for Christmas, doing advent pageants, outreaches, praying for healing, hurricanes and more.
Quite literally, staying alive and surviving 2008 was a major achievement in which events seemed to crash over me like a thousand tsunamis. At one stage it was just like this “When the enemy shall come in like a flood” – Is 59:19 but on the upside I learned how to be an overcomer.
And very recently I had to give up my friendship with just about the only person who ever understood all of me. I was standing there one day and I had this word, I said to her “I have to choose to go back into pain” (meaning aloneness, which is very tough for someone with my past)
At the time I didn’t know that meant giving up my friendship with her. Indeed, it’s a great pain to separate from a special person, in order to “make space” (as God put it) for the right person to come. God even spoke to my friend and said the same thing to her that a counsellor had said to me 18 months ago… that if a friend satisfies my needs, I won’t huger for the right person.
And do you know what the kicker is? Because of the face blindness thing, I may not even know if that right person is sitting right in front of me. Sucks eh?
Faith + Hope + Love 