I Wish Someone Had Told Me...

...but, as it is with most things, I probably would not have believed them. Or, maybe someone did tell me, but I couldn't hear it.

Here are just a few - off the top of my head - of the things I THOUGHT I had to do.

I thought I had to 'help' people. Like go out and find them and turn them into a 'ministry'. I have no doubt that there exist people who ARE called to do that. There is no such call on my life. When I struggled with how to do this thing that everyone else was doing I felt like such a failure. So, I gave up that struggle and just told God that He would have to drop someone on my doorstep, and He did just that. More than once. Oh, and quite often the doorstep wasn't literal.

I thought I had to figure it all out. Like my friends. Some of them think they did, and, frankly I find them tiresome now. Because I know they did NOT figure it all out. It CANNOT all be figured out, and it's truly annoying to have to listen to people who think they have. Wasn't it St. Augustine who said something loosely translated as "If you can figure it out, it isn't God"? I realized that I was never going to travel in the group of 'those who thought they had it all figured out' after attending a Women's Bible study at my church. After 12 lessons on becoming a certain type of woman, I found myself standing in front of my dryer praying that my underwear would dry in time for me to leave for the last lesson. Can't one still be Godly without having every duck in a row? My ducks liked to spin out of control from time to time. Just for fun, I like to think. Certainly, I still TRY to figure things out. But, it would have saved me a lot of grief if someone had just told me it couldn't be done. Not completely, anyway.

I thought it mattered more how things appear than how they actually are. Unlike (or would it be like?) Hyacinth Bucket I'm no good at keeping up appearances. I see this as a major problem everywhere. Now that I know beyond any reasonable doubt that NOTHING is as it appears, I'm cynical, yet trusting in a guarded sort of way. A worthy goal, I've found, isn't to hope to find oneself suddenly sinless, but finding oneself so sinful that the only real good that can happen is that the time between the sin and the repentance becomes shorter and shorter. This is what has always confused me about Christianity. I hear the TV evangelist variety telling how bad they were, and then Christ entered their life, and they became good. It didn't happen like that for me. Christ came into my life and showed me how much worse things were than even I thought possible. He never told me, 'There, I've fixed you up good, now you go point out to everyone else what is wrong with them'. He seemed to say to me something entirely different. Something more like - come to the party where everyone is an honest mess, but together I'll teach you where to find the joy.