When Life Turns Up The Heat
March. 2020. My Journal.
Yesterday I hit a wall. A tremendously large wall. All I could see was freedoms that have been taken away, kids that make mess and don’t help clean up, no stress release as all my favorite parks and trails are closed, it seems even public places are shut down. Where can I go? Daniel is here all the time and I feel like I can’t relax. A lovely spill-over from my growing up years; as a child I felt like I must be productive and “on” every time my father was in the house, for his affection and attention was rooted in our productivity. Now with my husband home all day, I can see that this is transferring to him somehow, although he is in no way like my father, I just can’t seem to disengage the link. So I spin and toil and never sit down or rest. Guilt floods me every time he walks in the door. I am starting to have a very negative association linked to my husband walking in the room and I don’t know how to stop it. I will be schooling my kids at home for 9 more weeks, no respite in sight. No Mother’s Day trip to plan. No vacation. Hell, I can’t even go on a hike or take a walk in the park. It all came crashing down in a wall of hopeless yesterday, and then it started to rain. I couldn’t even go outside in my back yard. Trapped. Beyond trapped. Imprisoned in my own home.
I grieve.
As I cry I reflect on how much I hate who I am. What this has made me. I wonder, did it make me this way, or reveal something that was already there?
Today for the third time I made Pho at home. The rainy day brought on the needed warmth and delight of homemade soup, but this time I knew I couldn’t make the same mistake as before. You see the recipe calls you for you to skim the fat off the top of the soup. The first time I followed the recipe to the letter. I stood there over the hot boiling broth and skimmed the fat off the top for 10 minutes. Sweaty and tired, I didn’t think there was any chance that step was worth the cost. So the second time I made Pho, I skipped the fat skimming step. I decided to skip skimming the fat off the top and just stirred it in instead. Fat makes everything tastier, right? To my surprise, the Pho was subpar. Gross even. Everyone at the table, even those who had no idea about my skipped step, could tell that it just wasn’t as tasty. The fat in the soup mattered. So one who tries to learn from my mistakes, I knew this rainy day had to be one where I spent the 10 minutes skimming the fat off the top. I stood there, hot steam in my face, chicken and vegetables all swirling around in the soup, and I just lost it. I started to weep and pray, '“Lord, this is how Covid feels. Here we are, everyone in my family is a great ingredient. We are all wonderful ingredients of vegetables and meat, but then you put us all in one pot and turned up the heat. The stress is just too much and I feel like I am boiling over. All the worst parts of me, the anger, rage, anxiety, depression, controlling behaviors, insecurities, guilts, fears….it is all rising to the top. Here we are in this house pot, I am boiling…and the shit is just all rising to the top.” I prayed out loud and then wept right into that pot of soup. But the Lord, without skipping a beat said to me,
“And if you let me, I can skim it off.”
I wept more. Tears falling into my soup but hope rising in my soul. Could this all be for good? “Yes, Lord. I would do anything to not just stir all this shit back into the pot and pass it on to my kids, please skim it off.”
Lord, today as I rewrite this story from back in March of 2020, I am reminded that this isn’t just the result of Covid-19 but of all the times in our life when we feel like the heat is turned up. When life turns up the heat; there are many instances when the worst parts of ourselves rise to the top. I pray that you will always be a God who helps us skim those parts of us away. Be a God who continues to purify us and make us more like you. Show us what is rising to the top so we can offer it to you, surrender it to you, so you can take it away. Have patience with us as we try to stir out gunk back in, and please help us to continue to give it to you instead. In Jesus name I pray. Amen.
