When it all quakes

If all goes as planned, this post will be published on Sunday, which will mark one week since my uncle’s homegoing service.

The coincidence is awkwardly fitting for me because this post is ALL about transitions — something I’ve been subconsciously avoiding for months now, perhaps even longer.

So much has transpired since the last time I posted content, and I feel really lame saying that because it’s cliche, life happens to all of us every day. BUT hear me please, so much as in life-changing experiences have been happening. A lot of weight has been shifting internally for me and it’s been quite frightening.

In the grocery store on Tuesday, I told my brother while trying to decipher which avocado was ripe enough (still learning how to pick my produce y’all) how I felt like I was in an extreme state of purging. 

“I’ve shed so much of myself, I’m scared to shed anything else. I’m scared to look in the mirror because I know I won’t recognize myself.”

From early May to September it’s been nothing but shedding. It started with a love-interest that high-tailed it out of my life and spiraled to a brutal falling out with friends, me trying to mask it with new people and flings only for those to buckle, me then, trying to find comfort in people who are the furthest thing from my peace and most recently, the death of my dear uncle — among the ugliest heartbreaks I’ve live to feel.

Again, a whole lot of shedding and not enough purging.

SO I THOUGHT!

Purging 

noun

1.  the abrupt or violent removal of a group of people from an organization or place.

2. purification or cleansing.

So here we go:

As I said above, it felt like a ‘whole lot of shedding and not enough purging’ but in all reality, I’ve been purging all along.

As I’m typing this blog, God is opening my eyes to see, transitions are rarely abrupt. Although to the eye it may seem quick, he’s always orchestrating in the background and it’s up to us to do the deep work and tap into what he’s doing.

From May to now I’ve been experiencing the rattling of my personal purge. The abrupt and violent removal has been ever-so-present. It’s as if my emotional and mental state has been a tiny house built in an earth-quake belt. I really don’t know how else to describe this period of my life other than a ‘great rattling’.

As the personal quakes of my life have occurred, I’ve lost loose materials. You know the glassware in cupboards that break easily at the sign of disturbance, so did many tangible things like relationships and intangibles like the ideologies and desires of my life shattered to the ground.

 Yet, oddly, enough, amid much mourning during my uncle’s service, I entered my purification phase. I wept for him the entire service, literally pouring out the gnawing pain that was setting roots in my chest prior to his burial.

 I poured out.

Crying until I couldn’t anymore. Sitting in my pain until it was time to get up. Being present until my present was pushing me forward. Now that’s not to say I’m not still grieving, because believe me, his earthly existence can never be replaced and shouldn’t.

However, my heart has tasted another sliver of peace. My chest is lighter than when I first heard the news, and my mind is free to take joy in his memories. My pain for his demise is being purified.

Likewise, the rest of my life.

I’m no longer walking on the broken glass of my former relationships but finding the courage to sweep the offense out of my heart. I’m tasking myself with pouring out to God all the pains of the months before just as I did in that funeral home, so I can live right before him. 

I’m believing that the strings he’s pulling in my background is preparing me for this next transition and that through his spirit I will be ready when the opportunity strikes to leave behind the old and put on the new.

Even when I can’t see it and surely when I don’t feel it.

I’m believing when the time comes I’ll be ready to leave behind the old and put on the new — whatever that looks like.

With all my light and warmth,

BW