getting up

This week the trend is for life to be ironic. You only get to see one such example, but really there have been many.

It was both funny and sobering when I turned back the pages in my journal on Tuesday as I ate breakfast. After much thinking and talking and crying on Monday, I finally got to the place where I could see that all my efforts at trying to get my life together for the future...were not working and, more importantly, weren't necessary. I was out of control...and what I was trying to control is beyond my control.

A counselor once gave me a picture of spheres of control. There were three concentric circles. The inner one represented things I can control. The next one out was things I have influence over but can't ultimately control. The outer one was things I have no control over. I really don't like those outer two circles. But seeing them helps me to look at situations in my life and think about in which circle they exist.

Once I realize something is out of my control, though, it's still another gigantic leap to accept that it really is out of my control. And it's even tougher to let God have control of it, which is really the only way things will work out.

The irony of my reading on Tuesday was that I was sitting at the table with all of these realizations and the peace that came with them, I saw that I had written just that in my journal...on SUNDAY. Why did I not at all remember thinking those thoughts?

The answer is, quite simply, that it's one thing to think of a concept but it's quite another to agree with it. And for me, to get to the point where I realized I was not agreeing with it, I had to get a bit hurt in my heart. I had to go down to a very low place, where the only place to go was up.

Also ironic is how very appropriately my new best friends of Relient K sang about my precise feelings:

I'll tell you flat out
It hurts so much to think of this
So from my thoughts I will exclude
The very thing that
I hate more than everything is
The way I'm powerless
To dictate my own moods

I've thrown away
So many things that could've been much more
And I just pray
My problems go away if they're ignored
But that's not the way it works
No that's not the way it works

When I go down
I go down hard
And I take everything I've learned
And teach myself some disregard
When I go down
It hurts to hit the bottom
And of the things that got me there
I think, if only I had fought them

Don't fret, ya'll - I'm good now, because the song, and my story, ends like this:

When I go down
I lift my eyes to you
I won't look very far
Cause you'll be there
With open arms
To lift me up again
To lift me up again