Courage isn’t because you know the outcome, rather it’s about the risk you take to persevere through something!
During your quarantine time-out are you finding an opportunity to rest and restore with cathartic reflection? Or is your isolation flooding your head with unrealistic worry? Perhaps you feel like you’ve regressed with unresolved issues? If worry or regression sound like you, maybe this will resonate.
During this quarantine, about five weeks in, many of us are alone or shut-in with family members that we don’t normally spend this amount of time with. Yes, even married couples are rediscovering their marriage vows, for better or worse, till death do us part. Some of you might be wondering how to help the death do us part along because if you have to fight over the remote control, space, rules, or messes left that aren’t normally there, you’re going to scream! I mean cry! Okay, laugh? Pray! Me thinks we are not meant to help facilitate that part of the vow, instead we should accept the Mars vs Venus challenge to practice loving our spouse even more.
Have you ever noticed that you can be an actualized adult, have a business, family, whatever it is you do, but when you go home to visit, you feel like a little kid again? You get irritated at the silliest things and you don’t know why. A whole different vibe covers the scene. Maybe your mother tells you how to carve the roast when you’ve been married 30 years. Or she cuts the crust off your bread and you’re like, “Hello, I’m not a kid anymore mom!” You just want to kill her, but you know that’s not the solution because, well, that would be a bad day and besides you love her. So what do you do? You stuff it and it comes out sideways 30 years later or maybe your rarely visit anymore. Is the shut-in driving you back to old patterns? Old frustrations?
Determined to break old thinking and family culture so I don’t repeat patterns with a death sentence for the rest of my life, it occurred to me perhaps the fight is our family culture. It is what I have. It is all I know. But the beauty is I can change how I view the fight. I can fight to live dead or I can fight to live alive. “…I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live…” [excerpt from Wounded Song]
Whether your quarantine is alone or with family, is it pushing your buttons on old tapes? Stirring the pot as they say, causing you to regurgitate old news, old patterns, repeat past conversations? Are you mad at stupid things people did or said to you a million years ago, or yesterday? Are you asking yourself why you’re feeling this way?
I learned that the thought of being rescued doesn’t always relax a person. Rather it seems to make them stop holding their breath and panic all the more to be saved.
[excerpt from Wounded Song]
Are you stuck inside with family and sometimes wonder, how you fit in? If you belong? How people can live under the same roof and feel so separated?
Our personal wounds distorted our sense of unity. We became aberrations of ourselves departing from within and away from each other.
[excerpt from Wounded Song]
I ask these questions because it occurred to me that while we’re stuck inside, we can revert to old patterns, old thinking, old ways of treating each other and without malice, not even realize we’re doing it so I wanted to share a little about my efforts to break family patterns.
Because of how I grew up, I began to ask questions over the years. I was relentless. Ask my family, I drove them nuts! I asked questions because I was tired of stepping over the invisible elephant in the room and tired of talking about the weather. Weather was neutral. Real feelings were fuel for fights. So I challenged my family with questions about our abusive past because I was tired of fighting what I didn’t know I was fighting.
At some point, the thing we are fighting can become the only thing we understand. We can imagine something is not right, yet we don’t know what can be different. In the moment of the very fight we are fighting, the fight becomes all we know.[excerpt from Wounded Song]
With resolve, I risked losing my family so I wouldn’t lose me. Pacifying old family patterns no longer worked because I felt like I was suffocating and withering. I wanted to get to the root.
“And we don’t discover the root unless we are willing to get our hands dirty and dig.” [quote from Wounded song]
Are you ready to take a risk? Everyone’s questions will be different because your stories and situation are different. Are you ready to ask questions, to start digging?
It’s never comfortable to be the first one to interrupt the family culture of conversation, but it can become an opportunity to find some missing puzzle pieces and perhaps move forward feeling a little more whole. With grace, patience and love, this isolation is an opportunity to begin to change something for the positive.
Okay, so you’re alone and not stuck with family members? Same rules apply. If you are in a funk because of old thinking, ask yourself different why questions to break old patterns.
It is risky business to want to discover truth. It takes courage.
Let me ask you this, what do you have to lose by seeking truth? If you don’t ask a question, you will never know if something can be resolved. If you ask, and nothing changes, you will know you tried and you will begin to change.
Nothing changes without starting somewhere.
Before, during and after I published my memoir Wounded Song, I risked alienating myself from all sides of my family with all my determined questions. I risked failing, not knowing if my story would help others. I risked not fitting into the author world, or fitting in anywhere. I risked negative feedback and I risked looking stupid (my dad’s message to me).
October 2012, still working on my draft, I risked sharing about my abusive testimony for the first time in our church because the church chose to take a risk to expose that abuse is real. It never occurred to me that what I was sharing took courage on my part until a friend approached me after my testimony to give me a precious gift.
Tiffany handed me a box which held a key necklace with the word COURAGE engraved on it!
Whatever it is you’re facing today, be encouraged that this too can change. It most likely won’t happen over night, but it can happen with the courage to take a risk and the belief in Hope.
My family is experiencing restoration in new ways I couldn’t imagine. My memoir was published. And now, we talk about things besides just the weather! Be encouraged. Aim for the victory!
“Hope will have its way, if you let it.” [quote from Wounded Song]
Webster 1812 defines courage as;
mental or moral strength to venture, persevere,
and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.
How will you aim for your victory?
You are not alone! If you are seeking resources, I can suggest a couple.