My belief in God is not that one man is in the sky ruling everything, but as a universal life force that runs through all living things and connects us all. It’s all encompassing and all loving.
I ran across this quote a few years ago. Right as I had walked into the storm of mid-life.
Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently He starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra door there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace.
~ C.S. Lewis
In theory, having a remodelled house turn into a palace sounds lovely.
In reality it was, and still is, tremendously hard to let myself be changed.
I like to think I welcome the change and that hard times make me stronger, but I can see that at times my thought patterns and definitions make me resist the change.
I still struggle with speaking my truth because I don’t want to rock the boat.
It’s hard to stand my ground because of my fears of rejection and loss.
It’s tough to quantify my worth because I don’t want to be greedy or scoffed at.
It’s difficult to choose me because I don’t want to be selfish or uncaring toward others.
I feel like these hard areas might be the building blocks of the palace, and once I embraced them, I knew I still didn’t have it right.
Being able to do it with kindness, softness and compassion….and without my ego jumping in, is the next level of hard!
The inner battle continues, but the good news is I can see signs of progress…and at the end of the day it’s all I can ask of myself.
I don’t need to be perfect, I just need to be a little bit better than who I was yesterday.