In all your ways, acknowledge me
and I will make your paths straight.
Whole heart. Not my own understanding. I guess this is how you want it then, huh? You want me to come to you for everything. Well, here’s yet another problem.I plop open hands onto my lap.You’d better take it too. I’ve got a long list I keep sending off to you, but it’s not too long for you. It’s most definitely too long for me. I’m too overwhelmed to even think about it.
I let the breath out of my cheeks and follow a squirrel’s path as it jumps to the blue spruce near me.
So Mia’s speech …
I don’t know what to pray, so I grab the journal and green pen I brought out with me. Time to write it out.
Apparently I needed to hear that I don’t take up space, but yuck. I hate seeing this in myself. I thought I was just being polite. Sometimes it is that, right? But you’re showing me how I’m trying too hard to be
I click my pen as I think.
I write,
Lovable. I don’t want to be too much trouble. I just want to slide by unnoticed. To avoid losing friend after friend like last year. But I can’t afford to be such a follower.
I stare at the curb along my street. I can almost see Aiden’s gleaming blue Audi parked there.
Please help me see it right so I don’t mess up my life again. And so I can be a genuinely good friend, not just an overly agreeable friend. Kind and not just nice.
See what kind of love I have given to you,
that you should be called my children;
and so you are.
That verse again. I chew on my lip.
I’m your child. You love me, and that’s enough. Make me like you. Change me so that any deferring I do comes from love for people and not from protection of myself.
I slump down and lay my head on the top of the chair. I try to make it stick.
You love me already, and that’s enough. Help me get it through my head.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Another nightmare,as if to remind me that flying back to Texas is no escape from my own mind. I calm my breathing and squint at the red numbers on my dorm room clock. 3:00 a.m. My fists clench into my blankets. I’ll never get back to sleep.
Like so many mornings, my nightmare has me stuck in a loop.
I can’t figure out how I let it happen. I sink again into the fogland of memories. I could get out of this one—I’m not yanked down like from a trigger—but I succumb, trying to make sense of it for the millionth time.
Cafeteria, high five, dates, pulling away, talking to Mom, promposal, dress.
I knew. But I didn’t know. I saw. But I didn’t see.
Why?
The nightmares aren’t improving. The questions that nag at me aren’t answered. My mind is no less disturbed than monthsago. I’m losing hope I’ll ever get better. Maybe I’ll find time for a nap this afternoon and the world will feel like a better place.
Probably not.
What am I supposed to do?
God brings to mind an old song by John Mark McMillan.“So Heaven meets Earth like a sloppy wet kiss, and my heart turns violently inside of my chest. I don’t have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way he loves us. Oh, how he loves us.”Tears fill behind my closed eyelids as I whisper-sing it to him.
