Hiking with a heavy rucksack
Rocks are heavy to carry in your rucksack over any distance. I recently found this when i went hunting for gravel to use as drainage in the bottom of plant pots. I laboured home questioning the ill treatment I am subjecting my body to knowing that I will be home in a bit and my back is stronger than it has been for years. This happened a couple of days after I said to myself that I will not carry around the pebbles of unmet expectation in my head anymore. I will lay down rocks of disappointment, and boulders of shame whenever I sense their burdensome presence. I have been and am going to counselling (also I'm studying it), and am also in conversation with myself, and my creator. A rucksack, it turns out, is for carrying heavy objects only a short distance, and even then you wake up with sore shoulders and that old pain to the left of the spine back for a few days.
From a young age I have walked around with stooped shoulders, not knowing that I suffered from a continuously tired heart, not any form of physical malady. I would interpret all the bad moods, haunted looks, angry outbursts done in my presence by those around me as meaning that I had done something wrong, or at least not all the right that I could have been doing. I grew up with a frustrated and often rageful father, as you can imagine my interpretations became problematic. I would carry around these leaden weights of impossible and often fictitious expectation in a rucksack and wouldn't lay them down, not knowing that there was a place to. God finding me; me finding him, started a process of finding that place to lay those memories and feelings down. And allowing my metaphorical back to recover, strengthen and grow straight. Today I found myself weighted to an extent again. I was carrying those damned expectation pebbles and was not placing them in the plant pots He provides where they will do some good. I think this might be real prayer. Placing the boulders of burden of others, and your own at a safe place where you know they will not lose their weight, but you learn it's not for you to hike them around with you. What can you do whilst barely being able to walk and talk? How much more life can you offer if you can skip, and jump, and dance, and sing