Old posts and mended fences

Well, here again, I have neglected to keep up the continuity of yet another musing medium. I am a terrible keeper of diaries, journals and the like.

So in order to allow myself some sort of feeling of accomplishment, I have gone back and published some previous posts from another place onto this blog. You will find them to be those posted previously to September of 2007, and they are organized ere as such. Some interesting stuff if I do say so myself, although I look back and the progress of my last year is evident.

As my 30th year draws to an end, I look back and I see that a lot has happened, the main event being the finalization of my divorce after a long, drawn out process of paperwork that only a European bureaucracy could create. But it was final as of September, and I am pleased that that part of my life is over.

Although I suppose that I am still "healing," I believe the healing going on right now is more of a deeper healing of wounds from my youth, those things that drove me to marry the wrong person in the first place. The Lord has narrowed down the wounds to a few memories that I have held on to all these years.

One of the main results of the wounds that I received at an early age was an unreasonably high standard and pressure that I place on myself to be blameless. Of course, I became very defensive at a young age, and there has always been a severe pressure of some sort that I placed on myself, whether it showed up as unforgiving self-standards, and eventually extreme guilt for not being able to maintain my own standards. Partially this pressure led me to maintain a relationship that deep down I knew was unhealthy to begin with. I promised myself long ago after my parents' divorce, that I would never let the same thing happen to me. Stubborn as I am, I gave that promise a run, and I nearly lost my soul in the chase.

The other main result of these wounds has been a lingering and elusive sense of solitude that has penetrated even my relationship with God. Of course, this solitude provided me with any other reasons I needed to stay in an unhealthy relationship. I just thought that at some point, even though I even felt alone with my ex-wife, it would turn around somehow. I know in my head that I am not on my own. But this lingering solitude has persisted even through the divorce and through a growing relationship with the Father.

When I was young, I used to help my grandfather fix the wooden fence around his property back in Texas. Usually this consisted of digging up the old posts and replacing rotten wood with new sturdy posts. Most times, he would tell me to dig up a post that looked fine, even though after I dug it up, it was evident that the post had severely decomposed from the moisture of the ground and an occasional bug. I remember wondering how he knew which posts were bad, until I got older and more observant, and I would see him walking the fence from time to time, exerting force, a push and a pull, to see how steady the posts held.

Of course, emotionally, the Lord is taking me through this very process. Every so often, I feel a push and a pull, and usually there are those parts of me that feel a little wobbly, but now I know that the Lord is revealing the areas of my life that need mending. Nobody likes for their emotional infrastructure to be uprooted, its just plain inconvenient. But, its necessary in order to withstand the more devastating forces that do more than push and pull a little.

I can feel the Lord going down the row of posts in me, and though they may look solid to me, He knows exactly which ones need replacing. From what I hear, He is a pretty good carpenter.