She was my age, played violin, wore braces and glasses, and was completely obsessed with turtles. I was a scrawny, freckled ten-year-old with crooked teeth and Barbie glasses and a desire to just find my place in the world.
I remember playing in her room with her violin or making up complex stories for the Barbies that lived in the Dream House that was totally cutting edge because it had an elevator. When we'd get kicked outside, we'd pack 'backpacks' with granola bars or apples and head off into the 'wilds' of the woods behind her house. Traipsing around for hours, keeping my eyes peeled for ticks and pretending to be pioneer explorers or Indians out on a hunting trip, was the highlight of my weekends.
I called that girl my best friend, until the day she avoided me with some other girls at Sunday School and left me crying in the bathroom. Now I remember that as when it all really started.
There was another girl, in those days, right up there as a bestie. She was African-American, adopted, and living like an only child since her sister was off at college. Star Wars and American Girl dolls were her things - I tolerated one and adored the other. I look back on the day I learned she was adopted and laugh at little-kid me. We were playing a make-believe game of princesses and galactic war when she stopped to go to the bathroom and suddenly announce "I'm adopted." I wasn't sure if she meant for real or in the game. (Duh, she's not adopted! I know her parents! She lives here with the Mr. and Mrs. that she shares the same name with! Brown skin meant nothing at all. It was like a friend with green eyes whose mom had blue, or a kid with blond hair even though his dad's was brown.) It honest-to-goodness took me until I was a teenager to put the pieces together. Let's just say I was a very simple kid.
This girl, adopted Star Wars geek, had another best friend. I knew the girl and even hung out at her house and made up fake (and highly inedible) recipes in her kitchen. I didn't know her as well, though, and sometimes I wished Star Wars Girl had more play dates with me and fewer with Kitchen Girl. I also really, really didn't like it when my Star Wars geek brothers came with me to her house and we ended up playing some game where I didn't know what was happening.
I could give a lot of other, more specific examples. There's the five-girl clique in my middle school youth group that sometimes resembled Mean Girls a little too much. Or how about my actual church's complete lack of teen girls since the other two families with teen girls left for another church? A less pointed and painful instance might be my middle school best friend's public school life that had next to nothing in common with my homeschool and church circles. Most recently, I'd point to the high school best friend who got a boyfriend during one summer and practically dropped out of my life once the busy school year started. That's the one that really squeezed my heart and snagged my attention.
That testimony about camp? I wasn't kidding. You don't have to have huge heartbreak or a great wrong done against you to have a whole awful lot of bitterness and anger to work through. Like I said in my testimony, I recognized the issue over this past year and really did deal with it at camp.
But in the spiritual world, just because you kill a dragon, doesn't mean it stays dead.
I spend a lot of time online - partly for working on things like my writing, this blog, Bible studies, or school; partly just to chill and veg or chat with friends. During my online time, I like to read a few blogs. I don't read blogs as widely as I used to, but I do still pop in occasionally on ones I used to visit regularly. Usually, I read a post or two, have a smile or a laugh, and then go on with my surfing.
Sometimes, I don't move on so easily.
I've helped newbie bloggers on more than one occasion. I enjoy helping people, and I remember the days I started blogging and how confusing and overwhelming it could get. Over 2+ years of any hobby, a person's bound to learn a thing or two at least.
Well, one of those newbie bloggers I helped - one with a great voice and sweet personality but not so great content and an awful blog design - has really made her way up the blogging mountain. Now, with a lovely streamlined custom design, the right niche of content for her voice, and the opportunities available for bloggers who aren't minors... she has over 450 followers.
I don't think I have to explain my inner conflicts any further. Anyone who's read this far has an idea of how this affected me at first.
Lord, I've been doing the blogging thing longer. I helped her in the early days. I've been studying blogs and doing all the right stuff. I even run giveaways and all. I mean, her blog address still has a hyphen, for Pete's sake! How is this fair?
2 Corinthians 10:12 - For we dare not make ourselves of the number, or compare ourselves with some that commend themselves: but they measuring themselves by themselves, and comparing themselves among themselves, are not wise.
Galatians 6:4 - But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.
Matthew 20:14-16 - Take [that] thine [is], and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good? So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.
God may have helped me whip that bitterness thing, but I've still got a ways to go. Back to weeding my heart's by the roots.
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