Broken or Becoming Whole?
I posted this on my Facebook page last night ...
"I'm wondering how long you can step away from your life and still find it there when you come back. Difficult to not wonder if you won't have a place in your own life upon returning.
Another thing I must let go of.
Sigh...
Praying that when I am ready to return I will do so with my truest self and leave all the pre-cancer chaff on the threshing room floor."
But then I reread a journal entry I wrote while sitting on the beach in Door County and thought it applied to my question so I post it here in response to my own query.
Perhaps the wounding I am experiencing is not so much a preparing of me to help others or to have more compassion, although it is those things for sure. But it is maybe more profoundly a way for me to recognize that I need others and that they need me. In this needing, I can begin to recognize that my incompleteness is my growing point. In the plant world we call that the meristem, the place where new growth springs, where the active living tissue sprouts forth. I often have spoken of the brokenness of humanity and that metaphor holds truth for sure, but I am learning that it, like most metaphors, is incomplete. Maybe the more accurate metaphor is the use of the word unwhole or incomplete. We are incomplete without God and the infinite God finds a home in the soul of humanity. We were created, the Bible says, in His image, we were created, as C.S. Lewis claims, to reflect some aspect of the character of God that no one else can display. That means I am incomplete without my fellow human beings. I have spent so much of my life working hard to be independent. I learned from earliest childhood that I had to do it myself, not trust others. It has taken this cancer to show me my deep need; my need to trust, my need to depend on others, my need to continue letting go. My need for wholeness. I am recognizing that as I become more whole I am able to reflect back to others the truth of God in them back to them and they to me so that in one another's presence we can both be more of our truest self.
Afterthought: praying that my chaff is gently blown away to reveal more and more of the true grain.
Currently sitting in the Infusion Center receiving fluids to hopefully ward off weekend dehydration 😄my first disclosed selfie🤔