The Role:
I am standing in a room full of people waiting to audition for a part in an upcoming feature film. I have skills, have a body and face, I have the drive for that leading role and once in front of the directors and crew you are asked “What role are you here for”? All of the ones I used to be but only better.
For the past year, Covid 19 has been like standing in front of a panel of everyone you have ever met and answering for everything you ever did, everything you have ever been and everything you have ever consumed and put into your life. It has been a whirlwind of regret, penance, shame and guilt and has been the kind of experience that leaves you looking around out at all of the people you love and wondering what just happened to you and them.
The whole kitchen sink of regret over nutrition, community, family ties, charity, friendships, committments, work and divorce flooded over me like a tidal wave. I found myself asking over and over again who the heck are you and what have you done with this life you were given. Then I remembered, I am already forgiven.
It all started six years ago after my sister passed away at a young age. Suddenly, I found myself questioning my own existence and whether my life had been fullfilling and rewarding enough and was told that if I was of service to God, I would start manifesting everything I could have ever dream of in life. That sounded amazing. Sign me up. Soon I was off and running towards a new life, with new promise and everything I asked for just magically started to appear.
In an attempt to get as close to the sun as I possibly could without getting burned, my eyelashes and skin have much to say about the trek I took without shades. In my quest to find more, I found less. I was creating art and writing and acting like the world was mine and that I had no obligation to anyone. A consumptive pattern of taking and not giving emerged.
My friends and family looked on with observation of an ego in full drive. I was eating an hourly dose of healing, consuming numbers, facts, figures, psa’s and clips of anything that would fulfill me. I found myself in a state of adrenaline overload because information was coming into my brain so quickly that I no longer knew how to be a human being.
Then the lightbulb came on and the aha moment where I realized exactly what this “Love” thing was really all about. It was about physical love, emotional love and spiritual love not only with myself, but with the creator of it all.
Looking around the planet at all of the wonderful things that are on it, it does become easy to deduce that we were not created to be sedentary, emotionless, and physically devoid creatures. Man and Woman were created with their own unique qualities each bringing balance to the other with harmony and synergy, until that pesky serpent enters your life and the lives of people you love around you. The serpent is self doubt, apathy, an ingractious attitude, and an unwillingness to change your negative junk.
In co-relationships of any kind, if there is lack of any kind the system begins to break down. Self worth is tied to the reflection we see in the mirror everyday. After you have a child with someone, your sense of privacy and modesty tend to go out the window and you forget that it is not a pleasantry to witness your spouse as they suffer through physical ailments or bodily functions. As we age and witness death and disease around us, fears about long term longevity and happiness infiltrate our minds, because we are inundated with it day in and day out everywhere you go. Our infrastructure is built on tension, distraction and promises for something better. Our own government promises change, while telling us that it can’t because it is gerrymandered. We are constantly living in a society that tells you that you aren’t good enough while trying to sell you to keys to perfection. Medicine says it there to heal you, but if you read the fine print, it says it might
We live in a state of opposites every day and the one you chose when the world is enticing you with a dangling carrot could mean the difference between your children respecting and honoring you or not. A good formula for discerning whether something is truly good for you, your life and balance can be accomplished by asking the following:
- Is it creating good will in my community.
- Is it taking away from the quality of life or adding to it.
- Am I enriching the lives of my friends and family by making this choice.
- Is my contribution at work benefitting from this decision.
- Have I produced good work for myself and others with the choices I’ve made.
- Will this make me more respected or less respected.
At that time, I didn’t make those critical decisions. I had become bored, lonely and unable to communicate with a spouse that for years worked away for long periods of time and didn’t give me some of the basic things I kindly kept asking for in intimacy and love.
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Soon I was on a merry go round of ego based and narcicisstic drama in my mind over a version of love that I had read as a teenager. Colorful and dream like, the people around me were watching me fall off a cliff and I didn’t even notice it until one day I found myself as one of the bad characters in the greatest book ever written.
I asked, was I really that bad of a person?
The past year, I have been able to answer yes to that question.
The person I lied to most was myself. I was pretty transparent in my debauchery and had gotten to the point that I didn’t even care who knew about my decisions to walk out towards a fantasy.
After facing the shadow of who I thought I wanted to become, I realized that all of the chasing and scheming to be like someone else, I lost my way. Following along others journeys, I suddenly found myself wanting to be someone other than me and by consuming the life of someone else, I began wanting to emulate them because they seemed to have all this power. I learned that the power was from a source that many don’t bother to tap into because they are overpowered by shame and guilt and never release it.
When I realized where all this power was actually coming from, I became highly embarrassed that my interpretation of them was so bound in ego. It wasn’t ego, but a correctness and there is a huge difference. They were teaching the way and the way was godly in its delivery.
There was a curve and the starkness of that curve set me into a tornado of coming to terms with a lot of baggage. Junk I didn’t even know I had stored inside. Trash that had piled up inside of me. Lack of knowledge, lack of understanding and lack of love that sent me into a panicked state of “what have we done”?
Well, we have loved. We have fallen down to get back up again and we can work and strive to be better than before. I am thankful for all of the help along the way and in a way I’m thankful for the ridicule, scourn and regret, because those are the things that teach you and make you want to never experience those feelings again.
A well run society does not succeed unless all of its parts work at achieving a higher moral standard and Covid has taught us that iniquity is created when one falls down on the job of setting those standards in our children and holding each other accountable for our failures.
I’ve taken a long time to recognize these things and becoming transparent and admitting how much of a jerk I was is the first step in recovering the person who God intended. Hope, Love, Faith, Honesty, Committment, and Friendship are the only true things that sustain us in difficult times. When you open the door and allow the light to come in, deamons no longer have a place to reside.
