Is life a perpetual contradiction?

I have been involved in a number of conversations lately and I have realised how differently each of us sees the world.  Depending on our beliefs, teachings and experiences we all interpret our world and what is going on around us slightly differently.  I can often believe something very passionately and then I will have an experience that alters, deepens or erases that belief.  I can say one thing and then do the complete opposite, it is very confusing.

Last night I saw the end of a documentary about Paul the Apostle and it discussed how his writings in the New Testament have influenced society more than most of us would recognise.  He said some beautiful, empowering and inspiring things that revolutionized how people thought about and treated each other.  We have one of his quotes hanging in our kitchen “Love is patient, love is kind, love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way, it is not irritable or resentful, it does not rejoice in wrong doing, but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes in all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7).  He also said “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28.

However, Paul is also quoted as saying some much less loving and inclusive things, like “A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet” (1 Timothy 2:11-12).

The documentary highlighted the contradictions in Paul’s writings and it made me think of all the contradictions in my own life.  For example I find thinking and talking about money offensive and dull however I love spending money; I hate paying taxes but I love that we have high quality public hospitals and public schools; I feel as if love and relationship is the most important thing and earthly possessions are meaningless but I am very attached to our home and where we live; I believe every human being has been perfectly created yet I think and say some very unkind things about these perfectly created human beings, myself included.   The list goes on. It is like I have this ideal in my head that I strive for but sometimes the reality for me is quite different, creating a world and life full of contradictions.

William Blake, English poet and painter who died in 1827 said “Do what you will, this world’s a fiction and is made up of contradiction.”  I tend to agree.  Look at Saint Paul he made three long missionary journeys throughout the Roman Empire, planting churches, preaching the gospel, and giving strength and encouragement to early Christians. Of the 27 books in the New Testament, Paul is credited as the author of 13 of them. Paul was martyred for his faith in Christ by the Romans, about 64 or 65 A.D. Paul towers as one of the all-time giants of Christianity yet still he was surrounded by many contradictions, so what hope do the rest of us have?

Do you think it is possible to live without contradictions?  Do your own contradictions bother you or do you just embrace them as part of your unique, curious and magnificent personality?

Adventure of the spirit or excuse to be lazy?

I can not decide if being a Stay at Home Mum (SAHM) is an exciting adventure of the spirit or just my way of hiding from reality and avoiding hard work.    Every day, each hour, even fleeting moments can contain exciting adventures of the spirit.  I love my children, husband and life so much I have tried to stay busy so I wouldn’t have to feel the complete emotion, I didn’t want to be completely and utterly overwhelmed by the love, and the subsequent exhaustion, frustration and constantly changing tempo of life as a mother and wife.  I wanted to have a small amount of control, my own identity, which I thought I maintained by having many other things going on in my life ... but I am slowly starting to let go, to let it all flood in, to be fully present, immerse myself in all its glory, and endless frustration, and it is wonderful and worrying all at the same time. 

I feel so grateful for all the blessings in my life, the amount of love, the wonderfully rich relationships I get to enjoy, I feel a great responsibility to recognise, acknowledge and celebrate these blessings, these individuals, these relationships.  This can sometimes feel like a cover for being lazy, an excuse to talk on the phone, to spend hours on end with friends and their children, an excuse to go shopping for birthday gifts, a reason to do craft and play games and a justification for sitting still and relaxing.  Sometimes it is exhausting just fighting these feelings of guilt, writing this I feel I am trying to justify my choice, to convince anybody that will listen that staying at home with our children is a worthwhile pursuit, and one that I am capable and deserving of.  I read books on it, attend courses about it, I am consumed with the desire to prove to myself and world it is alright to stay at home.  Embarrassingly I always try to work into the conversation that I have two University degrees, see I just did it here, again trying to justify myself.

 

I have a very detailed idea about what a SAHM should be, she should cook a lot of beautiful homemade food, it would be preferable if she could sew, she should have a thriving fruit orchard and vegetable patch and make cordials, jams and preserves, she must be very frugal and make do in any situation, she looks after the household finances, she should have at least four children and her house must be spotless at all times.  An extra cherry on top would be if she ran her own small business from home, preferably her own label of health foods, homemade beauty products or range of adorable designer kids clothes.

 

For some people this is their reality and I will be forever jealous, and if I was any of these things I don’t think I would struggle with the fact that I do stay at home. For me a SAHM does everything they tried to teach us in Home Economics, which I hated, and now I can’t do any of these things.  I can love my children, I can make my husband laugh, I am good at coordinating great parties, I love taking photos and recording wonderful moments we all share together, I love sitting still and listening to and sharing stories, if something gets a rip or a hole it gets tossed out and I throw out a lot of left-overs.  I yell sometimes and even occasionally throw a thing or two, and sometimes I shout out the back door just cause I have to.  None of these things fall into my idea of what a SAHM looks like but guess what I am still a SAHM.  From right now I am going to try and stop justifying my choice and I am going to enjoy this exciting adventure of the spirit, goodness knows where it might lead or how long it might last.

 

I will continue to pray that I can enjoy it, all of it, and not rob myself of joy by thinking about all the things I am not. 

Living the dream is off to a slow start

Since I finished University and entered the workforce in 1999 my life has been about one deadline, event, project or function after another.  I have been involved in coordinating, promoting, attending and completing more community events and projects, big and small, than I care to remember.  Then once we decided to become parents back in 2005 there has been a lot of planning, organising, heartbreak and celebrating tied up in that process, which for us has been an eight year journey to get two beautiful children.

After many months I have finally made the decision to be a full-time Mum with no part-time jobs on the side.  I want to be fully present with my children and husband, I want us to have the time and energy to realise our dreams of living lightly, trying to produce our own food, not creating so much waste, setting faith and family as our priorities every day and not getting caught up in consumerism/materialism.  Sounds great but it is proving much more challenging than I thought.

I thought my life would look like the pictures out of an Australian Country Style magazine, but not yet.  Since making this decision my body feels like it is shutting down. I am having a whole range of strange symptoms including fatigue, conjunctivitis, blocked ears, head colds, body aches and I think my body is physically realigning to the fact that I have no deadline in my head, no to-do list, there is no plan for the first time in a long time.  I think I may have over-relied on my Catecholamine hormones (these regulate stress responses and includes adrenaline) and now my body has to start functioning without them.  I have no medical training but this theory sounds good to me.

 

To make it worse our home life has not become miraculously more organised since making this commitment.  There is still a massive amount of washing to be folded and packed away, the floors need vacuuming and mopping and I have not embarked on my juicing, bread making and homemade baking as I desire.  Life is pretty much the same as before I just have absolutely no money and feel more tired than ever before.  I’m not sure this was the plan.

 

Anyway, despite the immediate shortcomings of my plan I am determined to continue with the experiment, I hope I have made the right decision, and even if it takes 20 years to reap the rewards, if there are any rewards to reap, I hope I have the courage and conviction to try and live my life the way I feel I have been created to live it.  Wish me luck.

Does your life resemble art?

“This particular artwork is lacking in detail, the perspective is unusual and there does not seem to be a strong focus but it is light and draws in the eye, there is something captivating yet indescribable about the piece”. If my life was art I think this is what an art critic might say. 

 

Often everyday life sucks the air right out of my lungs, the weight of responsibility is heavy on my shoulders and I get exhausted thinking about what needs to be done, before I have even done anything.  I get so bogged down in and consumed by what I think I ought to be doing and this, along with the guilt of not doing most of it,  has consumed most of my life to date. 

 

Recently I have found it necessary to strip my life right back to the core, which for me is God, family, love and relationships.  I am struggling with the process.  I feel lazy and irresponsible dropping off all my commitments but I genuinely feel they were distracting me from what is truly important, the joy of living.  All I want to do is praise and worship my heavenly Father; nurture, recognise and enjoy Mother Earth and love my husband, children, family and friends with all my heart.  For me, these things require all my time and effort. 

 

Money, my little earthly brain says, oh but what about the money, how are you going to make money and I don’t know.   I feel so abundantly blessed in so many ways that I feel I am doing an injustice to bring money into my life equation.  Easy enough for me to say, I’ve always had enough money for anything I have ever needed.  Money has seemed to take care of itself in my life, so far anyway, so I will continue not to focus on or worry about that.  In making that statement I feel incredibly irresponsible and selfish but I just don’t feel I was created to focus on money, but see how it has hijacked my thinking right here, I’m going to move on.

So, as I sit here in my pyjamas at 8:20am, my children play noisily on the deck, my husband is driving his beat up old tractor around his paddock just because he can, the washing machine is going, the breakfast dishes are stacked in the sink, the sky is blue, the air is warm, the birds are singing and I am going to go and plant trees along our driveway.  I will try not to think about all the other things I should be doing, everything that needs to get done next week, what I will cook for dinner, what people would think if they came to visit right now, all the things I would love to have and I will try to block out the insecurities, the fears, the worry and just live in the moment.  I will appreciate and recognise all the blessings that surround me, right now.

If I can learn to do this with every minute than my life might resemble art, and wouldn’t that be magnificent.  I know my life has been created by an amazing artists on a spectacularly amazing canvas, so what am I waiting for?  What do you think, does your life look like art?

Love your neighbour as you love yourself

It has dawned on me I do love my neighbour as I love myself, the problem is I do not love myself very much at all, which means my poor neighbour bombs out too.

So many things have been happening in my life to make me examine love and how I love others.  I recently participated in an online linky thing where we all wrote letters to our 16 year old self and this made thoughts and feelings I had buried deep resurface and I cannot make them go away.

 

For so long, maybe as long as I can remember, I have felt I was too ugly to be loved, even too ugly to be liked.  This then led to feelings that I was useless, unkind, unworthy and to protect myself from rejection or failure I built tough barriers around me.  The barriers took the form of always searching for the negative in people, reducing my opinion of them so that if they rejected me it wouldn’t matter because I had already decided they were less than perfect anyway.  This applied to new people but I think to some extent I also used this strategy on my immediate family, everybody.  This of course then led to a deep loneliness.   This was all disguised behind a care-free, happy and life loving mask to try and win the approval of people I had already rejected.  How exhausting.

This negative assessment of each and every individual I ever come into contact with, and the assumption that given the chance they will reject me, combined with the negative self talk that has consumed my body, wrapped itself around my heart and festered in my soul, has resulted in a long life of thinking and speaking badly about myself and lot of other people.

 

I do not like recognising these things about myself, as I write it is hard to for me to breath but for me it is part of the process of stepping out of the dark and into the light.  God cannot dwell in the brown murkiness that is my soul; the light of Jesus cannot shine bright through me if I do not love myself.  If I am not courageous enough to recognise these feelings I may subconsciously burden my children in a way I would regret forever, I may not be able to love my husband in a way that creates a long and beautiful marriage and I may waste my entire life on things that do not matter.  I want to love my family, friends, community and world as Jesus intended, which requires me to love myself first.

I am inclined to believe I am not alone in having these negative feelings about myself.  I believe most of us love our neighbour as we love our self and this is why there are such high rates of suicide, depression, substance abuse, divorce, loneliness and violence.  Do you think our prisons would be overflowing, would our child safety employees be so overworked, would 45% of marriages end in divorce if we loved ourselves?  I don’t even think we would need to spend so much on education if we all felt truly loved.  We wouldn’t have to worry about so much insignificant nonsense and therefore we would all be better able to learn and reach our potential.

So where do we start?  Becoming aware of the problem is a good place to start.  Allowing ourselves to feel vulnerable this might give other people permission to explore these feelings too.  I have set myself the love dare not to talk negatively about anybody.  I think this alone will help me to love myself more.  It will help create a more nurturing and loving environment in my heart and my house.  I will continue to search for how I might love myself more and I would love to hear any suggestions and thoughts you might have.

A letter to Justine

Emily Freeman has invited people to write letter to their teenage self (http://www.chattingatthesky.com/2012/09/11/dear-me/), to celebrate the release of her new book.  This is my letter, it was fun writing it, you should have a go.

Dear sweet sweet Justine

I need you to know you are loved and you have been created on purpose and your future is filled with peace and joy and hope.  You don’t know it yet but Jesus is with you and one day, when the time is just right, you will understand the meaning of life.  You do not have to work this out for yourself right now, live and it will come.

Yes people are mean, those boys teasing you and the girls excluding you, you will barely remember their names by the time you finish university, they will have no impact on your life at all and you will not even see them again.  Don’t hate them.  I know everybody else is but I am not sure attending your Debutante Ball is such a great idea, if you do insist don’t have your hair done in ringlets.

As far as I can tell you are never going to appeal to the masses but throughout your life you will meet and be friends with beautiful people.  There are going to be times when you feel really lonely and you will constantly search for a better way to exist, but this will be exciting for you and stay true to your intuition, it pays off and you are rewarded with more love than you can dream of right now.

Try not to be so angry, I know you are afraid of being hurt, not fitting in, of being exposed, but relax, life truly isn’t that serious.  Love your Mum and sister more, don’t slam the door so much, even though it feels good sometimes.  Your little sister is awesome, I know you hate her because she is beautiful and life looks easy for her, but she needs you to love her more, she will be your best friend and confidant throughout life, she will be there when you go into labour with your first baby, she will be your sweet, kind and calm bridesmaid, you will talk to her on the phone every day ... yes everyday.

Don’t make that barrier between you and everybody else any thicker or higher, as hard as it is; try to enjoy those people around you. Laugh a little more freely, shake free of the responsibility you have placed on your own shoulders. You are young, you have long legs and beautiful hair, love it, enjoy it, savour it because youth is wonderful. 

 Nobody expects you to have all the answers, relax.  You are gifted in so many ways.  You don’t think you are beautiful, but you are interesting and wonderful people, that you like and respect very much, will want to spend time with you.  You look at yourself and see all the things you are not, or don’t have and some of these things will taunt you continuously, and will always make you feel a little insecure but embrace all that is great about you, and there is plenty.  You want to know what you will be when you grow up but I still have no clue, my only tips are take photos, write stories and learn to love.

Practise saying nice things to and about people, people you like and those you don’t.  It sounds stupid but this is something you will want to master later on in life and if you start now it will be much easier, and save you lots of grief.

The day you hold your baby niece for the first time, say your wedding vows, and cuddle your baby girls with all your might, and invite Jesus to live in your heart, these are the days that matter and they are coming, you are beautiful, you are loved and you are blessed and will be a blessing to many.  So hang in there kiddo, you are loved more than you will ever know.
Love from Justine

Only the lonely

How many songs do you know about being lonely, the first two that pop straight into my head are “One is the loneliest, number one is the loneliest, Number one is the loneliest number that you'll ever do” (http://youtu.be/22QYriWAF-U) and “Only the lonely Know the way I feel tonight Only the lonely Know this feelin aint right” (http://youtu.be/kjq4wYuwgxs).   Being lonely is one of the greatest things I fear about getting old but this is not why I want to discuss loneliness.

Tonight I lay on the bed reading my children stories before bedtime, they were draped on me, stroking my hair, asking me a bucket load of questions and I just looked at them in complete awe.  Here are these amazing inquisitive, super intuitive, loving beings that I am blessed to know and love.  I feel privileged that I am able to spend all of my days with them, and I feel honoured and humbled that they love me, not because of what I look like, what I can do, they just love me.  It got me thinking we could learn so much from their approach to life.  If we all start out like that does anybody know when do we get turned into cynical, task orientated, judgemental, hypocritical grownups? 

I know I will have the pleasure of having my children in my home for such a short time and I am absolutely committed and focused on loving them and enjoying them, as much as humanly possible, during this time.  I get fleeting feelings of impending loss and heartache when I think of them growing up, but I also get feelings of immense pride when they are able to turn and sing the Tim McGraw song Last Dollar,  “1-2-3 Like a bird I sing Cause you've given me the most beautiful set of wings I’m so glad you’re here today Cause tomorrow I might have to go and fly away” (http://youtu.be/EyFwMd_a6JI).

 

So what does all this have to do with being lonely?  I am thinking one of the most important things we can do to make our world a lovely place to live is to actively do things to make people feel less lonely.  A new person moves to town, invite them over; visit an elderly neighbour; say hello to people in the supermarket; post a birthday card to remember an old friends birthday.  They seem like little acts that could easily and justifiably be over looked in our busy days, but maybe, just maybe, making people feel loved and connected might be more important than getting to a meeting on time, mopping the floors, mowing the lawn, working late to meet a deadline.

The tricky thing is you don’t even have to be alone to feel lonely.  You could start with the people that live in your house, does anybody feel lonely, misunderstood, unheard?  I am reading “The 5 Love Languages of Children”, and I have also started reading “The 5 Love Languages” both by Gary Chapman and this has opened my eyes to the most important relationships in my life.  The concept of love languages examines how we receive love, and if we don’t talk the love language of our spouse or children they may never feel completely loved, and therefore will not be able to reach their full potential.  It is fascinating and I cannot recommend the books highly enough.  I have also been attending a 6 week workshops that includes learning how to be a better listener.  All these things are combining to paint a detailed picture of what is required to love properly, so those nearest and dearest to us don’t feel lonely.  Up until now I kind of assumed we all just knew how to love, but with knowledge and commitment, we can love so much better.

I feel a little like I am on my high horse and I should stop preaching, but I am so obsessed with love at the moment and the benefits that come from love that I just can’t stop thinking, talking and writing about it.  What do you think?