the slow art of mending

When I find myself trying not to look across the room, wondering. When I find myself waiting for that acceptance in some form of contact. When I find myself assuming rather than knowing. When I find myself waiting and hoping that this isn’t really rejection but just miscommunication.

When I find myself asking “was it something I did?”

When deep down I am really just asking myself “is it something I am?”

Everyone hates rejection. That does not make me special. The desperate pain we all feel when rejection hits our hearts and the ache causes our chests to cave in and our breathing to become shallow. This is real.

But perhaps I am the only one who feels this way.

I find myself desperate to mend the feelings of rejection that seems ingrained in my soul… that crop up when an expectation isn’t met, when an invitation isn’t extended. When leaving feels like rejection, even though it isn’t always. When criticism tears open a wound where a freshly healed scar was mended by a prayer. I want to mend, I want to take the bleeding wound and cover it with gauze in the form of anything but what it should be covered with just to stop the bleeding.

I so want to be that person that finds contentment in every moment given by a person. That is happy with the time given. But I am not. I feel insecure when an expectation isn’t met. I feel rejected most of the time. Security in friendships very rarely exists for me. Yet I am forced to play the part of secure so my anxiety is hidden underneath a calm exterior with a coffee cup in my hand and an even expression on my face.

This is more than understanding who I am in Christ. This is more than just believing that I am his child and that he accepts me totally and completely. I know this deep down.

But I also know the rest of the world doesn’t.

My whole life I’ve been telling myself that I am known and loved by Christ. But this has not changed my desire to be accepted by the rest of the world – especially by the ones that mean the most to me. It’s much easier for me to find my identity in those that fill the rest of my world, and to allow what they do to change the way I see myself. All the while knowing how Christ sees me. I manage to separate what was never meant to be separated.

I ask God to stitch together these wounds with words on paper, with prayers murmured, with music that allows salient tears to form in the corners of my eyes and drop down onto the back of my hands. The slow mending works to heal several times each week, but as disconnected as I end up from the reality of what is happening, my irrational feelings surface and they are masters at opening more wounds.

So the mending is slow. But it is deliberate. I am inching ever closer to the “joy that seekest me through pain.” There is a love that will not let me go.