Pain Hurts Me

I experience emotional pain very physically.  Maybe that's normal, I don't know.  I've never been in anyone else's skin to understand how they feel their lives as they happen but I know that the word 'hurt' is so accurate. Pain really hurts me.  When I see starving children on my television, when I learn of the death of a friend, my heart literally hurts.  Like a little bomb has just exploded in there, leaving bits of me scattered all around, bleeding.  I often say, "Ouch, my heart".  I know that sounds childish maybe, but its the only word I have.  Ouch.  That hurts.  When I found out that my mom has cancer I spent nearly a week feeling physically ill.  It was so real that I even jotted it just so that I would remember it later.  "My skin hurts, like the sun is burning me".  Hurting skin.  Like I my body was trying to escape the covering that traps it in the here and now.  Sometimes we long to escape it, to run away.  And I've recently been feeling a new pain, more of an heaviness really.  Occasionally, out shopping or on the street, at the most unpredictable and inconvenient times, I'll see a beautiful baby, new, tiny, and just the size that you know, if you were to hold her, she would nestle into your chest and feel like she's an extension of you...and my arms will ache.  Literally.  They physically ache.  Ache to hold a little beauty and know that she is mine.
Someone asked me the question recently, "When have you felt most alive, most human?".  And, for me, times of pain are often times of feeling most human.  Being human hurts.  To be human is to be small, to be damaged by sin we do and sin done against us, to be sick and broken...to depend wholly on God.  The smaller I feel in my circumstances, the bigger He is in the reality of my day to day.  The more I surrender.  The more I hope.  The more I beg forgiveness.  The more I believe.  And the more human I become.  More fully how He designed me to be.  Fully dependent on Him.  I hate the pain.  But I love how He speaks to me through it.

Trying to get back into it. Post 1 - Pink Lipstick

My mom gave me a new scarf a while back.  It's one of those cancer awareness campaign type things - a beautiful pashmina that is a lovely pinky coral colour.  Gotta love scarves recently as we were making the news in our minus double digits temperatures.  So we were at my parents' place and "baby" brother, now an 18 year old basketball star, had a home tournament.  Remember, home for me is a town of 500 where, to quote a currently popular country song, people know you by your first name, what kind of car you drive, and what you did last night.  Everybody knows everyone and their business, or thinks they does, or just goes ahead and invents things if they don't know anything interesting and would like to spice things up .  When  I was away at college my best friend informed me that there was a rumor going around that I was dating a neighbor guy and it was getting serious and then she would periodically get updates about how we were on the rocks, and then we were back together.  I can understand an initial rumor but for there to be installments of the drama in a relationship that didn't exist made me laugh and cringe at the same time.  It's a strange dynamic of a small town that anyone who has lived in one can relate to and those who haven't don't really get.  Back to the scarf.  You know how you feel before you go to a high school reunion and you want everyone to think you look good and are successful and really much cooler than they gave you credit for at the time?  That's how I feel pretty much every time I'm back in my hometown.  I was terribly uncool when I attended school there and some certain people had no qualms about reminding me of that fact every day.  So, when I walk back into my high school gym, I still feel like everyone is looking at me and talking about me and judging me...oh wait, maybe they are...like I said, this is the nature of small towns.  I wanted to look good for this game.  The best revenge is living well, and all that.  I wore my new scarf and was happy to discover that a pink lipstick I had bought a while back was a perfect colour match.  I don't usually wear heavy lipstick but I put it on a bit thicker this time..."Lookin' good" I told myself.  Get in the car with Dear Husband and we're off.  There must have been something about the way the light hit my face when we turned off the gravel road and onto the highway because he suddenly looked and me and said "Whoa!  That's some lipstick!"  (Glare, then roll my eyes and find something very interesting to look at out my window).  It's not the first time he's made what I am totally convinced is the innocent observation of a curious mind....I'm willing to let it go.  He's back peddling now...I can almost see his mind whirring, trying to figure out how to recover.  "What?  It looks good, I've just never seen it before.  (brace yourself)  Is it your mother's?"  My face freezes like the icicles on my window.  "My mother's?!!!"  Now, I love my mother and I think she has good style, but she's well old enough to be a grandma and, honestly, what thirty-something wife wants their husband to think she looks like his mother-in-law.  "So you're telling me I look like a grandma, is that it?"  He's totally baffled.  Which totally baffles me.  "Really, is that what you heard?"  Yep, sure is.  My poor DH.  You'd think after 9 years of marriage he would have learned to just tell me I look hot but, for some reason, (my dad does this too so it must be common among the species), he feels the need to ask lots of questions.  Where'd you get that?  (Why does it matter where?  Does it look good or not?)  Whoa, that's  different.  Are you really gonna try that on?  (Why, do you think it's hideous and I shouldn't?)  What is that?  Oh, it's a zit.  (as if I'm not already intimately aware of every mark that shows up on my face)  And you'd think after 9 years of marriage, that I would learn to not be offended and insecure because I know he really does love me and think I'm hot and, well, I married a detail oriented, curious man.  You get the good with the bad.