A Moment in My Life – Tuesday, January 19, 2021
Life goes through its seasons like the weather. We never know what it would bring. Like today, it is a beautiful sunny but blustery day. I intensely dislike windy days when they coincide with garbage day. Ugh. What a mess! Basketball stands, recycle and garbage bins knocked down. I have never seen the wind so strong around here that it could blow down the Honey Bucket porta potty that my neighbor rented. We woke up to trash spewed all over the neighborhood. Luckily, this time, my next-door neighbor started using trash bags. Otherwise, that would have been a picnic for the birds.
Life brings people into our lives, and life moves them along. It never matters what I think or what I want. It just happens when it happens. Months back, a friend shared that she would move from the bay area to Hawaii when she takes early retirement, and before her thought reached fruition, I was already mourning the loss of having her nearby. Last week, a few friends left Facebook because they had enough of the ugly explicit posts by those venting about current events. My heart ached with each loss reminding me that life is no longer as I knew it. I don’t like change. You’d think by now I’d be used to it. I don’t think I ever will.
I hadn’t sobered from last week’s losses, but life keeps going with or without me. It has a job to do, and it never fails to show up for work. I was looking forward to a peaceful holiday weekend. Before the weekend arrived, I was busy deciding how I would spend this weekend. Would I get productive and address some projects, or would I take a day or two off and enjoy the long weekend? As it turned out, I didn’t have to bother with a decision. On Saturday, I learned of some friends resigning from their jobs and will be moving out of state. I was so not prepared for that news. It turned out that was only the appetizer. The next day, another couple of dear friends also announced their departure plans. Suddenly, my weekend was filled with a new angle of sadness, dread, mixed emotions, and plain mourning for what’s to come. You can imagine what I filled my weekend with, and there aren’t enough words to express everything that I’m feeling. Losing people has never been my strong suit.
As solemn as this weekend was, it was an eye-opening experience, and I learned a valuable lesson from the recent episodes in my life story. I’m a survivor, and I deal with whatever comes my way. I will meet many people who will come into my world for a season, and at some point, they will move on. Like the Bible says in Ecclesiastes 3, there is a season for everything. I know this, but it took a while to accept that there is a reason why things happen when they do and why people come and go regardless. It’s good to form relationships and grow attached to people. That’s healthy. It becomes unhealthy if we grow so attached to them that we rely on their being here for us, and most likely, we will be disappointed.
That was me. I counted on certain people being here for me, but in just a couple of years, God has taught me the act of letting go. I wasn’t a good student because I didn’t get the lesson that He was teaching me until now. I have been placing my trust in the wrong places. I was trusting people when I should have been trusting only God. I get it now. It’s not a person that will be here in my time of need, but people. God will place the people in my world at the right times. Just like the knocked down bins, they will get uprighted. God will make sure that that will happen when we need it because He knows everybody needs somebody.
