Yesterday I had mentioned that I had began an 8 week exercise using "An Ignatian Prayer Adventure" and today I almost quit. I almost quit because it got hard and hit one of the spiritual wounds I carry and I don't like to talk about. It took me 6 months before I even considered mentioning it to my new confessor. This is a wound that I don't like mentioning but always seem to come out once I trust someone, a lot. It has also been one God and I have been working on together, slowly, like taking off a bandage with care. Well, today it got ripped off instead. But here's the deal, I wander to different places, I never quit the journey.
When I was a teen I had awful self confidence, I thought everyone hated me and I never knew who I could trust. A mentor of mine and a priest suggested that I begin praying using Psalm 139. It was my rock, it gave me hope and as a teen I had too many highlights and girly doodles around it to signify my obsession with this Psalm. As I grew more confident in myself, my need for relying on this Psalm decreased.
Fast forward to my post college years to now. I am happily married and my husband and I are trying to start our own family. The beauty of how God creates individual life is evident and apparent to families and readers of this Psalm alike. It scares me that my husband and I may never know or fully understand what it means to assist God in his creation. I am afraid that part of it is selfishness because my husband and I are happy with our lives right now, and the other fear I often hold is that I've done something in which infertility is my cross that I am being asked to carry.
This brings me to the questions that the exercise asks me, How does God gaze upon me? I feel like God looks at me with the love that is beyond compare. He looks at me with the same love as when he created me, and will continue until I leave this earthly life. Because of this I feel ashamed and guilty for feeling like I have not and am not carrying my cross with submission.
I vowed that my husband and I would accept life as a gift from God, I just haven't been treating it as a gift. I've been demanding it as a right. By my own blind desires, I am again missing the mark.
Then comes the next reflective question of the day, How open am I to receiving this intimacy? Intimacy, a word that I heard all too frequently as a teen and young adult. It was often explained to me as the act of "into-me-see". Intimacy isn't just the love that my husband and I share with each other but how I am able to see into those I love, to know fully who they are.
This intimacy with God scares me because I don't want God to see inside of me. I don't want God to see my brokenness and woundedness. I want to be better than I am and show that I've been a good steward of his love. Then I recall something I read from St. Therese of Lisieux in A Story of a Soul, "Here is one of those incomprehensible mysteries which we shall only understand in Heaven, where they will be the subject of our eternal admiration. My God, how good Thou art! How well dost Thou suit the trial to our strength!" Because I am loved, because God chooses to bring me closer to him, I am given a trial to which my strengths will assist me. Now, only if I could place what those strengths were.
Through it all, God is often referred to as the "Divine Physician"; if I don't show him what my wounds and scars are, how can I let him heal them? By doing this, I am also accepting of the intimacy that he chooses to share with me. Scary though it may be, it is also beneficial to me as his daughter.
Then comes the next reflective question of the day, How open am I to receiving this intimacy? Intimacy, a word that I heard all too frequently as a teen and young adult. It was often explained to me as the act of "into-me-see". Intimacy isn't just the love that my husband and I share with each other but how I am able to see into those I love, to know fully who they are.This intimacy with God scares me because I don't want God to see inside of me. I don't want God to see my brokenness and woundedness. I want to be better than I am and show that I've been a good steward of his love. Then I recall something I read from St. Therese of Lisieux in A Story of a Soul, "Here is one of those incomprehensible mysteries which we shall only understand in Heaven, where they will be the subject of our eternal admiration. My God, how good Thou art! How well dost Thou suit the trial to our strength!" Because I am loved, because God chooses to bring me closer to him, I am given a trial to which my strengths will assist me. Now, only if I could place what those strengths were.
Through it all, God is often referred to as the "Divine Physician"; if I don't show him what my wounds and scars are, how can I let him heal them? By doing this, I am also accepting of the intimacy that he chooses to share with me. Scary though it may be, it is also beneficial to me as his daughter.
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