Feeling Like a Thanksgiving Orphan: Being Broken and Craving God
So, I have to say to start off, it isn’t the wasn’t (I started this one Thanksgiving itself) WORST Thanksgiving I’ve had. That medal of honor goes to my junior year of high school, when my family and I were in a car wreck and the car caught on fire and my mother spent 3 weeks in the burn unit at the Augusta hospital. So yeah. It wasn’t that.
But I did feel a bit like a Thanksgiving Orphan this year. So much so that I couldn’t even really finish the post until now, until I had some distance from it. I didn’t have my babies with me until that evening, and I was hurt deeply by a friend. But I learned a very important lesson… I am broken and overly sensitive.
Broken and overly sensitive.
God, that sounds like a bad recipe, right?
I had something happen to me which, honestly, has caused me to question humanity in general. In a world in which Ferguson happens, and hashtags like #CrimingWhileWhite have to happen to spread awareness, in which my community fought and seemingly won a fight to save a building, in which I actually lost a client because of my viewpoints on these things (that’s going to hurt for a little while to be honest), in a world in which someone I am close to could be dishonest with me…. Well, being broken and overly sensitive sounds like a veritable death sentence.
But it is what I am, and I suppose I am realizing in this Thanksgiving & Christmas seasons that I should be grateful for it.
Being such a person allows me to sympathize with others, to more easily see their points of view.
It allows me to love big and wholly- even when it would be smarter to keep myself on guard. Even when I will likely get hurt.
And being so, I have realized, has allowed me to find others who are broken. And we have bonded in a way that no one else can. A friend who is willing to drive 159 miles to cry with you over a bottle of wine, a friend who will meet you when her family is in town just to stand there while you and your ex exchange you kids on Thanksgiving Day- because he changed the original plan last minute- those friends are the ones worth keeping close. And each of them are friends who have been just as Broken by the world as I have.
Those friends are also my reminder that God loves me. I’m not the best churchgoer, but I went this past Sunday. I like to sit in the back of the church, to hide and to blend in. I don’t go as often as I should, and I don’t talk about it as much as I could, but I keep God in my heart daily. He is a constantly source of reassurance in my life.
I really should not put so much faith in people. People are flawed, people sin, but I realized something in all of this: that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make ourselves vulnerable to trust. God trusted us with the life of his Son. He knows that we sin and yet he gave his only Son for the forgiveness of those sins: knowing that it was inevitable that we would continue to sin. He did this trusting in us, trusting in broken people, to still come back to Him.
I’m still going to trust, and pray, and love. I can’t do anything less. It’s really the perfect time of year for this lesson, as we are in Advent: the time of waiting for the Christ child. I’m going to work on being patient. And I’m going to be grateful for people who are broken like me who continue to grace my life.
Love to all y’all,
Molly
