Painful Truth

Tomorrow is my return to work. I admit that I have worries. After all, my current pill regime is an adequate, but not perfect solution and there is still admittedly a lot wrong with me including my continuing mysterious chest pain.

I keep thinking about last time that tried to return only to realize that I couldn’t manage it. I have been drilling and drilling, testing myself to see if can manage this. But, doing tests and simulations isn’t the same as doing a thing for real.

I am doing my best to surrender those fears to God and be hopeful and courageous- knowing that God will see me through to whatever end. And I am resting in the fact that I honestly do feel that God is telling me to return to work.

Still, my rapidly approaching change has caused me to be very reflective. I found myself thinking a lot this week about painful truths.

I remember a time with my nieces and nephews. My oldest niece had gotten into a fight with her brother. She scratched him and stomped off angrily. He came crying to me- a common enough occurrence.

But, this time, he showed me that he was bleeding. I fixed him up and went and got his sister. I told her to apologize. She didn’t want to and started talking about what he had done to provoke her. I showed her his wound, that he had made him bleed. She didn’t want to look. But, I showed her anyway. She burst into tears, ran and locked herself in the bathroom, crying that she was “a monster.”

So, then, I had to talk her down and explain that she wasn’t a monster and that I didn’t want to hurt her. But, I needed her to understand that her actions have consequences. I remember wondering at that time if I had done the right thing. But, then I flashed to another moment.

I remembered when I took the kids to the Museum of Civil and Human Rights. My nephew got very upset looking at the footage of the sit-ins, watching college students get beaten, yelled at, yanked, having things poured on them. He cried and said that he didn’t want to see any more. I held him and made him continue to watch. I told him that I knew it was painful and I was sorry. But, that I needed him to see the truth. Him knowing the truth was the only way to keep it from happening again.

That brought me to thinking about covid denial- how it still persists even in the face of all that we lost. I reflected that for many of those deniers, fear of the painful truth is most likely at the root. It’s very hard to accept painful truths. That’s why they say ignorance is bliss.

Painful truths cause us to accept the ugliness in the world and whatever our role in that ugliness may be. We have to confront the “monster” hiding within all of us, open our hearts to the pain of seeing human suffering. We have to be willing to be uncomfortable, sad, or mad. Willing to accept our own failures and limitations.

It feels so much easier to hide from it. But, that doesn’t make it go away. It only makes it worse.

When I used to teach Sunday school, I used to talk to my students about guilt. I would tell them to stop trying to avoid feeling guilt and looking at guilt as a bad thing. Instead, I told them to look at guilt as a warning sign. It’s your mind, your gut, the holy spirit trying to tell you that something that you did feels wrong to you. Even though you can’t go back and fix that thing in the past, if you listen to that feeling, it will let you know what to not do in the future.

You have to be willing to be uncomfortable to learn the lessons that the discomfort is trying to teach you.

If we can learn to confront the ugliness of painful truth, we can learn the lessons it has to teach us. But, if we continue to try to hide from the pain, we will only compound it-causing more pain to more people.

I pray that covid deniers learn to confront painful truth. As for me, I don’t know the future. I don’t know if I’ll run into a painful truth that shrinks my estimate of myself and how well I am doing in my recovery. But, I can’t be so afraid that I don’t try. And if I run into a painful truth, I’ll do my best to recieve it with my eyes wide open.

#reflection #spirituality #voicesofthevirus