A crowded room

Do you know I feel more alone in a crowded room than I do on my own.  It's such a strange experience of feeling lost in a crowd.  It's so weird to watch people talk about the weather, make dumb jokes about ourselves and at each other and all the time be thinking "this is so meaningless".  To want to stand up on a chair and go "hey people, get a real problem to deal with!".

Naturally my perspective is skewed right now.  I have bigger fish to fry than which day to "do coffee" or make a "play date" or what colour to paint the nursery. I am trying so hard not to be bitchy and irritable but today it's just hard.  I am flawed and I have ugly emotions and thoughts.  I am real.

Do I choose to stay home because it's easier, pretend because it's easier, talk about the frivolous because it's easier?  No I refuse to be isolated yet I struggle to see how being lonely in a crowd helps?

I get surprised when I see people being so pedantically focused on little suzie or  jonnie's first solids and every little detail of what they do.  Really, it's a pretty normal thing to do as a parent,  I just barely have time to notice or the energy to engage.  How I long for the simplicity of that former life.

It makes me glad for the friends not scared off by the storms and the relentless burden and long haul of surviving a trauma.  It makes me see God with skin on when they love and serve endlessly.  

Someone said tonight something complementary about a particular couple.  What an amazing couple, they are pretty committed.  Why do we esteem so highly a particular type of people.  Who did Jesus esteem?  Were they the most interesting people around?  Most educated and intellectual? Wearing the right clothes? Did they have  2.5 kids, late model wagon and a sensible sized savings account? Are they full of the right words, at every church meeting and amazingly gifted?  What is your ideal model of success, approval and esteem?

Sadly I know I have my own collection of garbage in my mind.  Let's face it, I am the biggest critic of all.  Categorising and making judgments all day and every day.  It's just my sinful nature.  Thank God my identity is in him and him alone.  What the world sees as wisdom, he sees as foolishness.  I must learn to bring my thoughts back into sync with that truth sooner rather than later.

It is then that I realise that the difficulties in life are the biggest gift of all.  Taking me closer and closer to him, to the truth and the security of the knowledge of who he says I am .  A daughter of the king, who he is working on day by day and year by year.  Hopefully making something beautiful out of an impossible situation, as only he can.  Beauty from ashes.