How to carry a crucified heart. Or, 6 tips for the person whose life is not what it was supposed to
"Who says how it is supposed to be?"
You gotta love how wrong we so often get it and how right God always does. Almost two years ago I stepped into a support circle, listened, looked around, and left thinking, "Good Lord...these are my people???" I didn't go back for a year.
Only when the time was right did I step back into that circle, and these people, my people, encourage me weekly, and always leave me with a word, a phrase, a question, a suggestion, a new hope with handles to hold onto. This week - as we struggled with the death of our expectations and all the things we just assumed would fall into place - it was a question from the facilitator that stuck in my mind and has been rattling around ever since.
Who says how it is supposed to be?
Let me ask you. What in your life is not how it was supposed to be?
What did you imagine life would look like?
And then, consider this...
What if your life, right now, is exactly how it is supposed to be?
Because we all do this.
We imagine what our life will look like.
What our life should look like.
And we check our neighbor to see what their life looks like.
As the years unfold and children grow, expectations run high, and comparison sky rockets, and sometimes I wonder if we even realize what we are doing, because I gotta be honest, on a good day it becomes crystal clear that I all too often expect from God things I really do not deserve.
But on the bad days... the hard to breathe days...I turn to God in anger because I expect ---if I can get real here---more. I expect from God all that I expected.
What did you expect from God? What did you imagine would be?
I imagined different. Easier. Lighter. Thinner. Always cheerful in a bohemian dress cutting vegetables from my garden and loving to make dinner for my family. Always barefoot. Because I was just that carefree.
I imagined health and wholeness and fullness and love gathered around granite counters that were always wiped clean.
Our imagination is a beautiful thing, but when not tethered to truth, it is prone to wander. We no longer contemplate or ponder, because our imagination has grasped a tight hold on us...what we imagine our life should look like becomes our goal; this "no real guarantee" we put our hope in becomes the cause of our joy. And then, when we wake up to a life that is unrecognizable, or a family that looks nothing like the one we imagined, or not there at all...and we are zipped up in a body that feels like an imposter because good, Lord, this new body was so not what we ever dreamed of...and when there is only a crappy job to go to or no job at all and even the dog isn't the kind of dog you really wanted...well, this list could go on and on, could it not?......we look in the mirror and find staring back at us a person who is so locked up in false expectations, so disordered in her priorities, so hung up on her own plan, that if you handed her joy wrapped up in a box, she would not even open it...because "opening a box" was not on her list of things she expected to do that day.
Let me ask. Are you trying to write your own story?
Do you find yourself enabling loved ones, and working extra hard at trying to make all of the pieces of your puzzle fit? What have you lost control of that has you pouring that third glass of wine, or eating the entire bag of tortilla chips, or staying in bed instead of getting up to pray?
Amazing, that even still, I fall into the trap...that I am the Author of my life. That I have control of others and can fix it all if only everyone would just get out of my way and maybe load the dishwasher just once so my need to control can go uninterrupted.
Have you met your Mother Mary? And don't say you don't need her because you go straight to Jesus. We all need a Mother. And if we had no use for Mary, trust me...God could have been born to us in a million other ways. But he chose Mary. So do yourself a huge favor, if you want to know Jesus better, and make God happy, get to know His Mother.
You know what I love about Mary? She never tried to grab the pen out of God's hand.
When Gabriel came with the great Ave, and took this young girls' plan and threw it out the window and in its place handed her something incredibly difficult to believe, she did not say, "Hey, Gabriel, hold the phone...because this is so not how my life is supposed to go!" But with blind obedience she said YES. But what I love even more than her yes? Scripture tells us that "Mary treasured all these things and pondered them in her heart." (Luke 2:19) When your life takes a turn with an unexpected event, trial or circumstance..do you treasure it? Do you ponder it? Or do you worry? Imagine the worst? Get angry with God? Rearrange the furniture?
And so I wonder...
How much more joyful would we remain in the midst of life's unavoidable chaos and disappointment if we learned to ponder more and project less?
Could you picture the well of hope we might discover if we could harness our wild imaginations, fueled by the suggestion of the enemy, that pull us straight into a story that was never meant to be our own?
Before Mary's intercession, I fought God long and hard. I said "no" to his plan, and I refused to carry my cross and I am here to say that the only thing more exhausting than carrying the cross God hands you, is dancing around it while angrily shouting at Him, "This is not how it was supposed to be!" Our crosses are not that impulse purchase at Target that we can return. They are gifts from God that we are not to give back but hold onto. Surrender is no small thing and I do not hint that it is ever easy, but honestly, if you can work yourself up to it and accept it wholeheartedly I promise that you will find all of that joy you imagined would flow from a life you imagined but was never yours in the first place. In fact, if I had to bet, the joy will be all the more....because the cross always precedes the resurrection. It has taken me a long time - but praise God I have at long last accepted - that all stories are good when you open yourself up to Jesus and allow Him to use it. Even when, especially when, our story is not what was supposed to be. And how grateful I am to our Blessed Mother Mary, who reminds me hourly....that we are not being called to imagine what we wanted, but to ponder what God gives, and to graciously endure it for His glory.
As followers of Christ, we are called to carry a crucified heart. And thanks to my homeboy, Saint Louis De Montfort, and his book True Devotion, that is wrecking me in all sorts of wonderfully horrific ways, I have scribbled down for my own holy survival 6 ways to carry such a heart with grace. So, if and when you find yourself in interior or exterior affliction...in other words, when you wake up to another day of pain and bone crushing despair because nothing is going the freaking way it was supposed to and there is this new padding of fat around your waist and thighs because as if menstruating for years was not enough you now have the sweet reward of 20 unmovable pounds around your waist and upper thighs as your big ol' congrats and welcome to pre-menopause, old lady....I will share this list with you:
1. have recourse to God with confidence
2. resign to His blessed will
3. do not neglect spiritual exercises
4. subdue ourselves, restrain and renounce ourselves in all things that we may act in concert with God
5. consider it our welfare and merit to be afflicted for the honor of God
6. be content to carry a crucified heart
(I know. Number 5 and 6 are the reasons why people think Catholics are crazy. I'm okay with that.)
Ripping out the disappointing chapters of your story because they were not supposed to be there is not an option. But responding to them like Mary is. About our sweet Lady, De Montfort writes,"...to believe sincerely without spiritual pleasures; to suffer joyfully without human consolation; to die continually to myself without respite; and to work zealously and unselfishly for thee until death as the humblest of thy servants. The only grace I beg thee to obtain for me is that every day and every moment of my life I may say: Amen, so be it." (True Devotion, De Montfort, p 219)
Mary, cause of our joy, pray for us.
