I write down everything important. I do this because if I don’t, I will forget. Appointments, errands, birthdays, three-item grocery lists — it doesn’t matter. I will forget it if I don’t write it down. They tell me this is a hazard of growing older. Maybe so, but it’s sort of always been that way for me.
A few years ago, I looked in the mirror and literally asked myself, aloud, “Who ARE you?” I felt like I was looking at a stranger. Of all the things I need to be reminded about, suddenly I needed to be reminded of who I used to be because the person who looked out of those eyes and into mine was someone I didn’t even recognize; it seemed I had become someone I had never intended to be. Divorced twice, often depressed, generally joyless and known by friends to enjoy drinking, I was nothing like the person I had been ten years before. I asked myself what had happened to bring me to that place and the only answers I could come up with were self-pitying and self-serving, so I threw them out. Over the course of the next years, the reflection in the mirror didn’t change much, and neither did the way I felt and thought about myself. I did, however, begin asking God to return me to the place where I’d come from, and to remind me of who He had intended me to be, of who I once was, and more importantly of Whose I am.
Over these years, I’ve had my heart broken several times. Unrequited love, disappointment with people, the deaths of those close to me. There’s a terrible danger to broken hearts; they take their toll and make demands that must be answered. Each wound presents the sufferer with a choice: grab hold of God or push Him away. In the moments when I gave in to my soul, I suffered for it by seeing my true self slip a little farther away. Thankfully those times frightened me enough that more often, I chose to cling to Christ, to recall His words to me, and to implore Him to hold me tightly so I wouldn’t lose my way.
There’s a particular song that has been meaning a lot to me for the past year or so. “When I lose my way, and I forget my name, remind me who I am. When in the mirror all I see is who I don’t want to be remind me who I am.” I could’ve written those lyrics. I wish I had, but thankfully, someone did, and put them to music, and someone else played them on the radio, and they help me every time I hear them to remember.
I’m a ragamuffin, but I’m loved by the Father, and that is enough.
What Living Feels Like 