Q, a better person by far than I am, is teaching today. Me, I'm taking the day off, in honor of Easter Monday. Thus far, I have conducted a one-hour spiritual direction appointment. And I went to Morning Prayer. Had a bubble bath and fed the boy cats. Remembered to take my pills.
That's about it.
Over Easter, I volunteered for a few things not already on my plate, and
tipped the balance into a negative energy level. None of them were necessary. And, because I was tired, I didn't do most of them very well.
It is a constant struggle, accepting the fact that I can't keep doing this. Even now, when it has been clear for years that I am not what I was, I push against it, try to carry burdens that are not mine to carry, and then am surprised when I run out of power. And when the one whose burden I try to carry is not helped much by my cushioning him against the challenges of his own life, and may even come to resent it.
There are some rules for living that can help with this.
1. Never do for others what they can do for themselves. You deprive
them of their chance to triumph over their own obstacles.
2. Don't attempt to give adults the things they should have gotten as children and didn't. It doesn't work. The task is to support the adult in the business of being one, not to find the child within and give it a teddy bear.
3. As much as possible, do only those things which are uniquely yours.
They are the ones that flow from you like a stream of living water.
They are the ones that use the qualities and gifts only you have.
One sign that something may not be uniquely yours is that you feel like you're bending over backwards when you do it. Use what you are, and don't try to use what you're not.
I notice that Jesus' rising from the dead didn't change everything in the world overnight. There was still misunderstanding and violence, hard work, unfairness, illness, warfare and death. The Resurrection didn't wipe out all the earth's sorrows. Those able to see him as risen were still unable to do a lot of other things, and that has continued to be the case, these two bthousand years.
Jesus is risen! Yup, I believe it, although I don't understand fully what it means. And I am not risen, not yet. Resting and waiting, still learning the hard way what love is and what it is not.
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