Saturday, April 18, 2020

Nobody said it was easy.


 I'm a big, huge Coldplay fan.  This has nothing to do with the rest of my post, other than this part of their song, The Scientist adequately describes how I am feeling right now. 

Nobody said it was easy
It's such a shame for us to part
Nobody said it was easy
No one ever said it would be this hard
Oh take me back to the start
I was just guessing at numbers and figures
Pulling your puzzles apart
Questions of science, science and progress
Do not speak as loud as my heart
This is just a snippet of this song, but I sat down to write a post about the way I was feeling about this whole Pandemic, and the words, "Nobody said it was easy" came to my head.  I have been struggling the past few weeks how to adequately describe my emotions, thoughts and feelings surrounding this time we are all facing.  I have had moments of absolute peace, severe anxiety, utter devastation, motivation, restfulness, yearning and grief.  

I want to talk about each of these feelings and explain why.  

Let's talk about peace.  For too long, I have felt hurried and rushed.  I already have extreme FOMO (fear of missing out) and tend to pass that onto my children, whether they feel that or not.  I have always thought of myself as an extrovert, but it's partly because I'm afraid I will miss out on something epic and awesome if I don't go to every. thing.  Since the Coronavirus has halted our entire lives and cancelled all of our plans, I have had tremendous peace.  We have slept in, erased our calendar and done life simply and quietly at home.  Soccer was cancelled, Maxine's three-day school was cancelled (and all the things that come with that), church, MOPS, coffee dates, playdates, Sunday lunch.  While I miss a lot of these things, it has made me reassess what we will allow back into our lives when this is all over.  I have felt a lot of peace just simply being with family.  

Yet, on the opposite end of the spectrum is severe anxiety.  I have never been one to struggle with SEVERE anxiety.  Every now and then, I will get anxious and overwhelmed and have negative feelings that seem to take over, but I've always suppressed them.  I don't like to live in a negative place for very long, so what I tend to do is vent out all of my frustrations verbally to someone or put on a good sad movie to cry it all out.  I don't cry easily so it helps to have a jumping off point.  In the past I would drown out my feelings with alcohol, but since that isn't an option, I have been feeling all of my feelings without much of an outlet.  I haven't been able to get away from the kids for breathers and talk with my people to vent things out and have a fresh perspective brought my way.  I have been fed fear-mongering lies from the media that I have been careful not to let infiltrate my thoughts, but the thoughts still come.  I am trying to figure out who I can trust and where we will be going from here.  I have crippling scenarios of "what ifs" going through my mind and waking me up in my dreams.  But, I have that balance of Peace to bring me back down.  The balance of God's word FILLED with promises, knowing that no matter what we face on the Earth, He is with us, and has the ultimate control.  No virus or world leader has the power, only HE does.  

Now, let's talk about the utter devastation, motivation and grief I have been feeling.  I don't know when it began, but a few years ago, I started to realize if I thought about someone else's pain and heartache enough, I could actually feel it.  I would begin feeling it on such an intense level I wouldn't be able to shake it from my mind.  Jordan told me that I needed to protect myself from these feelings, so I stopped being informed about the depravity of our world.  The magnitude of it would overwhelm me and I would cry for days on and off and feel pain deep in my heart.  I have realized that separating myself from the pain others face in this way is also not healthy.  We all need to face the truth about our world and the pain and horror others face, or we will stop caring. At the beginning of this epidemic, I was thinking about all of the people who live paycheck to paycheck, wondering how they would feed their families and make ends meet.  I thought about the substance abuse and physical abuse that would be ramped up during this time in the homes of some.  Praying for these people has been a daily priority, as I don't even know what else to do at this moment in time.  

I have watched the daily press conferences that the President has held for the past couple of weeks, just to stay informed.  The other day, he said something and nobody even followed up with a question.  He had openly said that he was going to be fighting the drug cartels trying to infiltrate this country during this pandemic, and had released the full power of the military in order to do this.  One of the reporters asked him if there were other illicit activities these cartels were carrying out.  Trump said human trafficking and sex trafficking.  He went on to talk about it for a couple minutes, and when he was finished, the media went right back to their fear-mongering tactics and president-hating rhetoric.  They completely ignored what he was saying.  As I started to look into this, I saw things that devastated my heart but brought me a lot of hope.  The media refuses to cover any of it, for whatever reason, but I needed to understand more.   In January he talked about completely wiping out these large human trafficking organizations and working to rid it from the earth.  There are literally millions of people suffering in slavery around the world.  Slavery is bigger today than it has ever been in the history of mankind.  

When I started to realize that Trump has been fighting two "invisible enemies" during this time, I wept.  I wept for the callousness of the media and people that don't support him no matter what he does.  I wept for the women, men and children trafficked all over this world.  I wept for a couple days while the weight of it all seemed almost overwhelming.  I was led to Psalms 2-6 and just got on my knees and wept them to the Lord as a prayer.  I have been filled with a fire that has turned my weeping into righteous anger.  I am feeling motivated now, more than ever to get involved in some capacity.  I am praying right now what God would have me realistically do during this time.  (I will be writing more on this topic next week.)

The next thing I have been feeling is a yearning.  We have been spending a lot of time outside and together as a family.  We've been barefoot in the yard planting thigs, playing in dirt and listening to the leaves in the trees blow in the wind.   I have a yearning for slow, nature, connection, friendship.  I know that we were not created to live these fast-paced, consumer driven lives.  I know we were made for much much more.  I'm hoping for a mass revival, spiritual awakening and a real shift in the way people make decisions moving forward.  Not revolving around success, money, fame or the "American dream", but rather for gratefulness, humility, community and spirituality. 

I know we live in a fallen world, full of fallen people, and we will never truly experience the fullness of life God designed for us until the time of the new heaven and the new earth arrives.  But, while we are here, maybe we can give a glimpse of that life to each other, our families and communities and start to value every human life.  It's time to stop turning a blind eye to the cries of poverty, slavery, injustice and human rights all over the world silenced by the Media and Hollywood.  It's time to truly see that this world isn't operating how God intended it to, and move in a different direction.   Let's heal, starting with our own hearts and way we spend the time left in our lives and continue that ripple into our communities and eventually, the world.  

"Nobody said it was easy, Oh let's go back to the start."