Blank Page

Have you ever considered “being” a blank page?

I hadn’t either until yesterday. At fifty years of age, it seemed to me that all my “pages” had scribble and doodle marks already on them.

Like you, I know my story well and, live life pretty much as an open book. In many aspects of my already written life, I am fearless; even a risk taker, and a trail blazer. Yet, there are pages…..whole chapters. that are still hard for me to go back and read…. they are too painful still…. still unsettled……read and read again with no resolve.

I find them emotionally crippling…. even today…. and when the winds of life blow them open, I am frozen in my tracks….unable to move…..and so I run to you old friend……while there are fewer and fewer of these kinds of pages, they are still there…

Seems silly doesn’t it. That at 50, fear can still grab a-hold, and keep you unable to more forward? I so thought I would have “it” altogether by now.

As I re-read my story, I can appreciate the dragons that I have slain,and the monsters I have tamed. I can lovingly gaze at the doors that I have walked through and opportunities I have seized. The slogan, “YOU HAVE COME A LONG WAY BABY” resonates with me and I smile…. no; I chuckle out loud.. I have come a long way…. I am becoming the woman I hoped that I would be, the woman that life long friends knew I could be, my story becoming one of hope and faith and possibility…Yet, I find myself, at times, hiding behind my weight as a protective layer – protecting me from the world of unknowns.

There it is…. that old friend of mine….the one that has gotten me through every chapter of this big life of mine…. Sharing with me the good, the bad, the painful, “he” is the last frontier I must conqueror and though he has been my steady comfort, my hand holder, …. in order for my story to continue…. I have to let him go..but how? “he” is such a part of who I am….my “go-to” guy….

What will I do when there is no more midnight adventures when life gets to be to much…. no more partying when life is going right, no more….. well just no more… He has become a vice….. a crutch…… a weakness….. a cancer in my life. How can that be, the one that has been my everything is now the one that is doing me in…?

He is an addiction and now I have to find a way to let him go…

Oh food, I will miss you.

You were always there for me…. there the night as a little girl, when life became to much…. as a young teen, when there was no one to hold me in the dark, as a young woman when life fell apart and, when I was a young mom in way over my head. There as I learned to let my little boys, now men.. go, and yet now… I need to learn to lean on God a lone….

Breaking addictions, whatever they are, isn’t easy. For me the word diet conjures up all kinds of emotions that I just 1) don’t want to deal with or 2) don’t have the tools to deal with. I do know that running to anything or anyone instead of to the cross is sin.. and so… this has to go.. this friend is literally killing me.

Not always do we find answers and solutions for those things that trip us up in this life. We may never know this side of heaven why things happen that happen, why those that should…… don’t…… why some leave us too soon, or why life can seem harder for some, than for others…

Thanks to a friend and her 90 challenge… I am about to try again to purge this dysfunctional friend from controlling my life, and as I stepped through this door and found the courage to be honest with my friends in the challenge of what I was dealing with, Suzi challenged me to consider being a blank page…..

As a writer; it enticed me. Her words setting my new course. Hebrews 12:2 “Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith…” I love it because it says to me that all He wants me to be is a blank page…He is the author and He is the editor! So, imagine all the wind blowing those old beliefs off your page, creating a clean, pure and perfect page for Him to rewrite YOU!

So, as I lay on the floor this morning…. face looking at the ceiling, arms stretched out to my side, eyes closed just listening to the air come in and out of my lungs…. asking God for a re-write, knowing full well that I cannot do this alone…

Today I am willing to let the answers wait… stop trying to have it all make sense and just be… a Blank Page……Let the re-write commence. 

(Thank You Suzi for once again inspiring me to be all that my author and editor intended me to be).