This past week has been hard, I think going home will always be a little hard for me.
On Friday I went home and made my brothers birthday cake. Then on Saturday I hosted his birthday party and mediated between my Mom and him. The party was pretty long and so I was wiped out after wards.
I started work on Monday and worked Monday and Tuesday moving trees and getting things ready for opening. Then today I did respite for a friend. The greenhouse opens on Thursday and then I will be working more regularly there.
Tomorrow is my first day off and I plan on going over to the house and starting to pack and sort through all my stuff which is piled all over the place from my various hurried degrees of packing and having my Dad and brother unpack over the last three months. So pretty much all my possessions are randomly located in boxes all over the basement and I want to find stuff and organize it.
I plan on downsizing. I have enough stuff to furnish my own house or apartment and well it seems that my life will be a lot of moving around in the next couple of years so hopefully I will be able to have a garage sale and raise some more money for the Congo.
My friend just gave me this quote "For as long as you can remember, you have been a pleaser, depending on others to give you an identity. You need not look at that only in a negative way. You wanted to give your heart to others, and you did so quickly and easily. But now you are being asked to let go of all these self-made props and trust that God is enough for you. You must stop being a pleaser and reclaim your identity as a free self"-Henri Nouwen
Coming home is hard because everyone has a box that defines their perception of me and that box is outdated so I really don't fit into it. Yet still people want to fit me into it. So it is a constant battle to break that mold
and have the freedom to just be me as I am without the crutch of doing and people pleasing.I am praying that I can find the freedom even here to really blossom into the person God wants me to be.That I will have the courage like the crocuses to poke my head out and make myself
I find it especially hard because the last couple of months I have been able to really just be me whoever that was in the moment, having the freedom to grow with people and discover the things that are core to who I am. Now that I have established some of those things it is a challenge to hang onto them when I am back in an environment where people really don't know who I have become. Their image of me is shaped by
my childhood and for most outdated by several years as I haven't lived at home in two years. So even though nothing drastic has changed a lot of subtle shifts in view point and mindset effect how I live my life and the motivations behind some of my actions are different. I am me, but I am growing and continually redefining what exactly it means to be me.
The three things that I know for sure are that I love God and want to follow Him, and that I love people. Those things haven't changed but the direction they take me has.
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