I was reflecting this morning and thought about a lesson I learned long time ago. I learned that people can have all the information they ask for about you. They can see you but not into you. They can have all the facts, figures, and educated guesses, and they’ll still have the wrong impression of you. They can totally read you wrong. At one time, I realized that I was misread and being “punished” for not becoming the version they read. I did a full stop on my life. I looked inwardly and realized this was not the life God forged for me. So I’m here, writing this blog entry, because this is what Crystal 5.0 looks like.
I looked at my life as a house, one of God’s many mansions, if you will, and I realized that I was not the house that God built.
I made all the outward adjustments. I painted the outside, cut the grass, and put a few flowers in the flower bed. I made sure the porch light came on at night and the garage door was always closed. In hindsight, I looked like the other cookie-cutter homes on that street, and I wasn’t happy about it at all. As I said, “I did a full stop on my life and looked inwardly.” I put my key in the door and started the rehab.
Doing this caused me to be the villain in other people’s eyes because I was no longer the me they wanted. I could bore you with all the details, like beating myself up for not doing this a lot sooner or being totally enraged with myself for allowing this to happen in the first place. I realized, however, that was a total waste of time and energy. If I’m honest, that’s the trap that kept me there in the first place. And before you say it, I wasn’t fake. I was, at best, a people pleaser. I didn’t want to disappoint anyone, and I didn’t like for people to feel disappointed in any situation where I was involved. I didn’t start out that way, but that’s where I was by the time this epiphany occurred.
The reality I sat with was that the damage was done, but it could be repaired.
There were fixtures that I needed to replace. That meant fond memories were being swapped out for the traumatic ones. Cracks in the walls were filled in. That meant I had questions about my past, and they either were answered long ago or I had to be okay with not getting the answers.
The floorboards were all torn up in some places, and that meant I made mistakes and didn’t correct them. Instead, I stumbled over them and kept tripping.
The staircase was damaged, and that stopped me from climbing, going up, and getting to the upper levels where the real work lives, in the mind. I needed a transformation in my mindset, but I couldn’t get there if the staircase was damaged.
I wasn’t reaching the face of God like I wanted and needed to. But the staircase wasn’t for me to repair; it was for God to repair. I just needed to acknowledge that it was damaged. The furniture was outdated, the windows were broken. You get where I’m going with this?
I love that poem by Langston Hughes, “Mother to Son.” Mother describes the house with “boards torn up, and places with no carpet on the floor.”
That’s exactly what I saw in my mind, and I needed to have a standing appointment with the holder of the blueprint.
While under construction and rehabilitation, no visitors were allowed. If I let you in, you needed to have the right articles of clothing and licenses. In other words, you needed to be vetted carefully. Hard hats, steel-toed boots, and permits were necessary to enter. And if I’m honest again, that didn’t change and will not change in the foreseeable future. This is what you would call, by today’s social media phrases, placing boundaries where they needed to be placed.
Now that the holder of the blueprint, God, had revealed to me the way this house was built, I needed to yield to the reconstruction and let it happen. When I did that, the house began to look just like He intended and just the way I like it. The furniture wasn’t trending, but it was well built and solid. The fixtures were sturdier and accented the home very well. No more broken floorboards or cracked windows. And look, the staircase is beautifully reconstructed, and I won’t allow myself or anyone else to touch it.
After the inner workings of the reconstruction, I began to redo the landscape. I added new bushes and flower beds with new favorites. I pruned the trees, trimmed the shrubs, and left some things to their natural pattern of growth. The house looked different, inside and out, and now I can live in it with peace, joy, and contentment.
Some places inside are still under construction. There are smaller rooms in this house rooms with purpose and intent, those rooms needed special attention. Yeah, those rooms, I’m still working on. But I’m here, intentionally living in the house that God built.
Leave a Reply