Not Ready

As I dropped Sonny off at kindy this morning, I said to the teacher, "I hope you have a lovely day. I'm off home now as I have a Rather Important Cry to have, and I need to get stuck into it."

She understood, we had a laugh, she gave me a hug and then she told me her crying story from when she moved here 11 years ago.

And I went home and had my Rather Important Cry. Just because.

The thing that set me off was the pressure to get "involved" in a church. Well you know what - I'm Not Ready. I feel sad, hurt, confused, angry, betrayed because of my premature forced departure from the best church I've ever attended. I know that we didn't need to move, we just ... moved. Although it bitterly hurt me, I moved out of love, and today my act of love has me in floods of tears. Don't forget I'm pregnant, too.

I want space. I want a few weeks or months (however long it takes) to mourn the loss of my Life - the friends I have left behind and the church that accepted me unconditionally and allowed me to attend whenever I wanted, as infrequently as I wanted. They let me be me. In a way, it wasn't quite like a church at all, it was more like ... A Nice Place To Be.

I'm not ready. I'm not ready to get involved in the morning services, night services, women's ministry, kids ministry, worship rosters, etc, etc. I've done it all my life. I've been eaten alive at some churches, and in contrast I was given permission to not-attend as much as I wanted to by my recent church. I wasn't ready to leave. And I'm not ready to re-join the roundabout this early, okay? I've only lived here for 14 days for goodness sake.

And now I shall close the comments. I just wanted to talk. I didn't want to hear you say that finding a church will help and getting involved will start the healing process and trot out the old story about taking a red-hot coal out of its fire and it gets all black and cold and then you put it back in the fire and it gets all red and hot again. I've heard it all before. Tonight isn't time for platitudes. Tonight is time for The Truth. The Truth is a raw, wild and spiky thing. And you just copped it.