On my own journey of awareness, it has been a series of things. I’ve written in this space before how it feels like I keep arriving, only to discover that I’ve not arrived at all, and I’m still schlogging up that hill.
Maybe some of you already know this. But I didn’t. This morning, I thought “what if God doesn’t give us more than we handle is not about the trauma, but about the healing process?”
I look at my own process of rising awareness, and it is as plain as day. I could not have handled the things I’m awakening to now, before. In the A.M. (After Marriage) season, i simply wouldn’t have been able to see it.
There were lots of times that I was given some visions that indicated a process. That wasn’t the surprise. We are in process all the time. The surprise was in how freakin’ long this takes. It takes a freakin’ long time. I’m not simply healing from a marriage that was not a marriage (a conclusion that could only be understood after much process), but healing and transformation of a lifetime. All the building blocks that tore me down, that obscured my true self from my own understanding had led to every terrible choice (I did not know some of those choices were terrible), bit by bit.
I don’t think the Sacred is somewhere figuring out the equation of what we can tolerate. What toxic load we can handle until we cave.
I believe the Sacred knows that the human condition is organic and ripe for decay at all times, and we are given secret passage through many things. Some we see. Some we don’t.
I’ve never liked the phrase “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.” My Aunt Delite scoffed in disgust after the death of her beloved husband, my beloved uncle, that enough was enough and who decides how much she can handle? Of course she can handle it all. But really, it was enough.
What if we see life from a different vantage point?
I’m wondering today, and these are just wonderings, if instead of viewing the trauma, the breakage, the decay as the thing God/Universe is offering for us to find our way out of, we accept that just exactly like the oak leaves that bud and grow, fall and decompose, we humans and our situations are the same. Why would we be any different than any other organic creature in this Creation? The difference is that we comprehend things at more complex levels. But I have no doubt the Oak Tree is comprehending its own demise, and each leaf knows its days are numbered as they turn to rust colored crisp. And then the leaf lets go, is wind-blown into fence rows, and provides harbor for some little winter mouse or green sprout of prairie grass.
We are no different. We just think we are a little lower than the angels.
Life hands us trauma: Imperfect health, imperfect family systems, imperfect religion, imperfect brains, imperfect bodies. And we ask why and are let down because it isn’t perfect and we have been hurt. Trust me, I’m not diminishing the hurt, but seriously, it is inevitable. Can we turn our point of view toward the healing? In the cycle of the Oak Leaf, it experiences trauma and new life. It experiences itself and life for something else that comes because of its own decay.
We humans are no different.
I often wonder (lots of wondering) if the biggest trauma isn’t the events of imperfection, but the moments that the presentation that perfection is possible and most people experience it, is known as a lie. It is a lie. And we are all unprepared for it. And we don’t know that our secret hurts that we’ve been told to not tell, have been experienced by so many.
The lie is that life is good and without blemish.
And so, part of the human experience is in the decay, the dimishment, the imperfection, the trauma, the wounding.
And then it is in the healing. When we take to the healing, we do so layer by layer by layer. We talk about peeling back the onion of our pain and covering of your true selves. Let’s change that point of view too. The onion is the healing. And it comes in layers.
Bit by Bit.
Because we cannot handle the healing all in one go.
Maybe, I wonder, the layers would be less if we were taught in adolescence that their wounds are just part of being human and helped them step into healing sooner? It would still be bit by bit. But an adult at age 56 has a lot more layers to uncover.
What if we stop glorifying the ability to handle things, and glorified the healing process before the layers of trauma get out of hand?
I’m just speculating here. You know. But I think I’m on to something.
With love and wonder,
Amy