Day THREE: What Drives Your Life?

Hospital day 6…Elijah had surgery on his hand yesterday. I worried excessively over the general anesthesia, but he did not have a reaction so – Yeah! He is now on sleep mode and will have to take several weeks of antibiotics. I am becoming a professional hospital mom I think. We had an eventful evening after the surgery. Elijah got to eat pizza and a rice crispies treat, and thought they were the best things he ever ate. That was interupted by a fire alarm. Not sure of the whole story there, but they didn’t make us gather our things and run down the stairs and for that we are grateful.

I am missing little Michael. He is with my brother and very well cared for, but you can’t help the mommy notions of no one doing it better than you. I can’t wait until we get to go home and I can sit and cuddle with him, and hear his little squeally laugh.

Day Three: What Drives Your Life?

Point to Ponder: Living on purpose is the path to peace.

Verse to Remember: “You, Lord, give perfect peace to those who keep their purpose firm and put their trust in you.” Isaiah 26:3

Question to Consider: What would my family and friends say is the driving force of my life? What do I want it to be?

It doesn’t take much for me to explain what the driving force of the last ten years has been, but I will warn you…you may not like it.

In a sense you can chalk it all up to marrying the wrong person and then trying to make that marriage work even though it never will. Anyone who knows me…or has known me since the high school years knows that I don’t do drugs and I don’t really drink. Doesn’t mean I can’t try to drink, but I become an idiot, so I just don’t. But the driving force of my life since I was 20 years old has been my partner is life’s addiction.

I have been trying to figure out how I got there for a while, even before I got this book. How I chose this person to share my life with and I haven’t figured it out. Did he chose me or was it a series of events that lead to the total annihilation of what I believed to the very core of my being. Maybe I am not supposed to figure it out. Maybe I am just supposed to accept, learn, forgive and move on with my life.

For the first 5 years I really didn’t care what happened, what he did, how he wanted to live because he always said that things would be different when we had kids. We weren’t even trying to have kids when I found out I was pregnant. (Actually I was packed and ready to go as far away from him as I could before I completely lost myself.) Except I got what I thought was stomach flu. Took a test and two pink lines later he said he would change and I believed him.

There was so much that happened even while I was pregnant I should have known. True addicts can’t change without completely losing everything they hold dear. We lost our apartment because three weeks after that test the restauant he worked at decided to close and instead of doing the right thing and finishing out the week and taking the unemployment he just quit. He quit and proceeded to drink for the next 6 months. We lived in a pay by the week hotel. It was disgusting. I kept expecting him to do the things he said he would when he was sober and fix the mess he had created. Only it never happened.

At 32 weeks and 3 days, just 2 days after my niece’s 3rd birthday Elijah was born weighing in at 3 lbs and 9 ozs. The stress of life had – in my opinion – brought on preeclampsia and got so severe it was nearly eclampsia and most definitely was HELLP syndrome. The OB said it would have happened either way, but I think if I had had a partner who worked with me instead of against me I wouldn’t have had all the complications that I did. It was the Lord’s blessing that Elijah was in the hospital for the five weeks following his birth because I hadn’t been able to pay for the apartment we were trying to move in to. I was supposed to pay the deposit the day I saw the OB, and she had me leave her office and go straight to the hospital. Another blessing at that time was a landlord sent from heaven she held the apartment and allowed me to pay everything as soon as I was out.

Things have been like that for the last ten years. Real life gets messy because of him and I have to fix it whether I really can or not. I have propped him up when he is down, I have given him CPR when I found him near death in our apartment after work, and I have accepted his apologies and excuses because that is what I believed that the Bible preaches. You forgive, forget, and live trusting that God will provide the lighted path that will bring about a miracle. Truly though the lighted path is there, just the constant bombardment of anti divorce ideas I have and because I don’t want to fail at something that big. Ideals that sometimes I don’t even know where they came from get in the way and I just don’t want to admit that I chose badly.

I am sitting here thinking about the benefit I have received the last 10 years, and that is Elijah and Michael. Two precious angels from heaven that deserve far more. I don’t want the pressure on them of saying they are going to be the force that drives me. I want to be the person that shows them the light for their own paths. There is a paragraph in the book that I hope I don’t get in trouble for typing here, but it explains exactly how I feel and why after so many years I finally picked up this book.

” Without a clear purpose, you will keep changing directions. jobs,
relationships, churches, or other externals – hoping each change will
settle the confusion or fill the emptiness in your heart. You think,
Maybe this time it will be different, but it doesn’t solve your real
problem – a lack of focus and purpose.”

I wonder if maybe I had picked up this book at 18 if I would have found my purpose and not foundered for so many years trying to decide what to do because I couldn’t decide on any one thing. I envy the people I knew as kids who knew before they were done with high school what they wanted to do and they did it. I wish I could have been one of those people. I just wasn’t and for the most part I am still not. I am going to try despite my gypsy tendancies to find my focus. The next line in the book comes from the Bible and reads, “Don’t live carelessly, unthinkingly. Make sure you understand what the Master wants.”

What do I want my purpose to be??? I can’t say that is the eternal question, I know that I want my purpose to be in service for others. I know that I want to help others overcome the problems that I have faced. I know that I want to write a book and sing in church, and that I want to have a normal family life. House, dog, happy kids that don’t have a care in the world except to excel in life and be better than their parents; and a partner in life who wants to take the lead on occasion and handle the hard parts with grace.

The words to the “Meant to Live” by Switchfoot keep rolling around in my head.

Fumbling his confidence
And wondering why the world
Has passed him by
Hoping that he’s bid for
More than arguments
And failed attempts
To fly,
Fly

[Chorus:]
We were meant to live for so much more
Have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside
Somewhere we live inside
We were meant to live for so much more
Have we lost ourselves?
Somewhere we live inside

Dreaming about Providence
And whether mice or men have second tries,
Maybe we’ve been livin’ with our eyes half open
Maybe we’re bent and broken,
Broken

We were meant to live for so much more
Have we lost ourselves?
We were meant to live for so much more
Have we lost ourselves?
We were meant to live for so much more
Have we lost ourselves?
We were meant to live,
We were meant to live.

We want more than this world’s got to offer
We want more than this world’s got to offer
We want more than the wars of our fathers
And everything inside
Screams for second life, yea
(END) – Courtesy of lyrics.com – (so if there are mistakes its not my fault)

Till tomorrow kids…