divided together

It seems like spending time with people who understand me causes me to withdraw. It should encourage me, right? But then I feel a time of rejection in it, from what was real the moment before. I can laugh and talk in the cafeteria but somewhere in my soul doesn't like that space, it's not right, not really natural. The food is fake, the conversation is often fake, the politics are real. Together here, we are divided, separated. I reject the food before it can reject me. In rejecting the food, I reject all it stands for. Does that mean I reject those that consume it? Those that made it?

The moments I accept who I am and who others are and that it can exist together, those are the exact moments I'm challenged as to whether I can really accept what's in front of me, I'm divided.

Is this the life I want? Is this what God has for me?

Is that trigger simply deception in my heart? I know it makes me want to turn and run. Is it a lie I've believed for too long? I only know it as truth.

To be vulnerable, to be willing to be hurt, is it too scary? Is my fear overriding it? To sacrifice the comfortable for the awkward so that I can be true to me, is it something I can do or am willing to do?

The moment I say it, it's out there, it's done, everything changes. Is it actually real? My own thoughts scare me. Am I ready for this change, this jarring of my reality, the one I've known for more than 2 decades? I think it's the last thing I have left that hasn't changed over the last 10 years. I'm not sure I'm ready to give up the only stable thing that remains.

It's not all up to me, the control isn't all mine. I may never really be ready.

My heart is exploding with the possibilities, yet my head twists and turns my stomach in imaginable ways. They are divided together, not allowing for the joy to settle and stick and permeate it all.

I hate the unknown, I really do. For someone who loves change and can't stay in one place for more than months or a year at a time, I really despise not knowing. Yet I believe in a God I can't see. How does that work?

Either way, I will rejoice in this time. I will search and find the joy I know is there. The miserable joy that keeps me going each day. I awake to see what happens in the next episode, will it be as dramatic or as funny as the day before? How will the action rise and fall and will anything be resolved today? Will any new characters be introduced? Will any roles change? I guess I must wait for tomorrow's episode..