To be pleading inside me so fiercely to ask for help to reach out and to feel so melodramatic at just the thought of it. To be afraid that what I’m dealing with isn’t big enough to take up someone else’s time. To cringe when people say to let them know if I need anything because I know how many times I have wanted to ask, but couldn’t force myself to actually make the contact. To practice what I’ll say in my head so many times until I finally talk myself out of it.
This is a reality I face most days. I have grown so used to be the keeper of other people’s burdens that when life feels heavy for me, I don’t know how to reach out, I don’t know how to put my burden down in talking with someone else. Even now when life has reached it’s ultimate irony (okay at least for me it feels like irony) and I am the one struggling to be okay, when my husband has better days than I do I still don’t know how to say, “hey could you come over here in this cloudy spot and be with me for a bit?” I don’t want to take up people’s time with things I feel like should so easily be able to handle on my own.
To tell myself day after day that I don’t need to be afraid to ask for help, but to still have no idea how to actually say it to someone. I euphemize everything because I’m afraid to have what is really going on come past my lips.
I think of others who are facing what feels to me like so much tougher trials…
To know that so many people are going through tougher times than I am so how do I reach out and take up people’s time. To feel that so much goes on behind the scenes of everyone, so how can I say that my life is hard (especially when some days it is very normal and boring).
But life isn’t a competition
But maybe that is the secret of life, knowing we each have hard things and that it isn’t a competition. It’s not if my life is harder than yours, its not what someone else’s life looks like at all. It is the fact that I hurt and you hurt and we aren’t meant to do it alone. Our covenant with Christ is to mourn with those who mourn. Maybe that means if I take a bit of your burden, and you take a bit of mine, that we both feel more able to move forward. That we both have more hope that we aren’t alone and that what we are trying really is possible.
