A Title

Nashville, Tennessee

In the home of.. eh, the Singhs, not sure what their first names are, except for my friend, Prat. It’s been an interesting few days. I feel wery strange. Like I’m about to make a big, bad move.. coming back to Knoxville. It’s really the oddest feeling.. I’m not sure what to do with it. So many things in Knoxville I just don’t want to do anymore. I feel like I’ve been juggling balls of fire over the years, and as I’m thrown another one, I compensate to let it in to the mix, and I just suddenly found myself juggling thirty-thousand of them… terrified to move an inch one way or the other, for fear they might all fall down.. and kill me.

Yeah, that’s exactly what it feels like. So for the trip, I (not so gracefully) passed the fire balls into God’s court, and fairly floated away with my new found freedom. Now, I’m not talking about responsibility being the fire balls, by the way. The responsibility in my life is awesome and difficult, and I’m working on it. The fire balls represent lies about myself extracted from statements and questions, thoughts and memories, people and lack of people, relationships and burned bridges, a scar, a letter, a gesture, a passing glance, a hair color, a phone number, etc etc etc that my inferiority complex (also known as the Enemy of our souls) tells me I need to “accept,” in order to “fix.” Sneaky…. but predictable.

I was thinking about this a few days ago, with a specific friend in mind. This friend of mine is a woman of few words; she’s told me before that she hopes she lives what she’s trying to convey to me, because she’s sure it’s not getting across verbally. Some might call that passive: acting something out instead of addressing it head-on… anyway, what I’m trying to say is: she is who she is, and there’s nothing at all about the fact that she doesn’t talk a lot that makes me think ANY less of her! In fact, in never would have entered my brain to think that a quiet person is in any, any, ANY way “lesser” in value.

I like how I can see these things in other people, and then realize that I need someone to tell me the exact same thing. Sheesh. I had a very, very, very rough few moments earlier this morning, when I was tempteeeeed OH I was tempted, SO bad, to just go ahead and start picking those fire balls back up early. Listen to the oh-so-original(!) lies thrown at me a little bit ago:

“You will never even be able to scratch the surface of your own stupidity.”

“You’re so insignificant, people who were once the closest to you can’t even remember your name, and don’t care to.”

It’s incredible to me how often I hear these things in my head. Also incredible how small they are when I back away from them. I can feel my eyes straining as I get closer and closer to the questions, “Am I that stupid?” and “Am I so insignificant?” and my muscles getting tenser and tenser… I work my heart into exhaustion trying to answer those questions, when the answer is in front of me all along. I am convinced that the goal of our enemy is the capture of our wills, and to capture our wills, he must entice. His own purpose is spiritual death, which it is his desire to make us concede our wills to, which is not very enticing at all, so he has to use things that are beautiful to us to attract us to it. Hm. Long weird sentence, anyway..

I feel like I’m kind of rambling, but this has been really good for me to just get out there. I’m stumbling ever more into the realm of King Wait-A-Minute, and man, if y’all don’t know him, he is such a good man. Mickey Lundy knows his cousin, Count Three-Breaths (HA!). Blah blah blah, don’t know if any of this made any sense at all, I’ll re-read it at some point.. thoughts, anyone?