Benched

So, five weeks ago today, I slipped on the ice while helping my husband take the trash out, and I went down hard.

As in tear-up-cartilage-and-my-MCL, hard. When the doctor looks at you, after you finally get an MRI three and a half weeks later, and says, “This is a serious injury,” you know it’s bad. The upshot of it is that I’ve been mostly on the couch for a month, and I’m facing at least another 2-3 months of taking it easy.

I’ve come to the conclusion, I became way too dependent on staying busy to keep myself from thinking. At the least, to keep myself from having to stop and write about what I’m thinking.

Not thinking isn’t good for a writer. We need time to think, to be still and shape those thoughts into words.

I’ve also come to the conclusion, without some direction to my mind and heart, I’m flat-out mean to those around me. It isn’t being busy and being overwhelmed that causes it, because having to park my butt in a recliner for an extended period of time didn’t make it go away.

All those things do is reveal the state of my heart.

I’m 48 years old. I’ve survived moderate childhood abuse (I say moderate because there were mitigating influences that kept my childhood from being completely wretched, and I know many, many people who suffered worse, my own parents included—and lest anyone speculate, it was not the pair most immediately involved in rearing me who were guilty), the loss of a parent, the loss of a child, countless smaller heartbreaks and griefs and stresses. I’ve been married for going on 28 years, given birth nine times. Endured more separations from my husband than I care to count, for the sake of his job and service to our country. You’d think I’d have learned simple gratitude by now. That I’d be stronger.

I  think I should be stronger by now.

God has a way of keeping us on the edge of our weakness, however, so we don’t forget we need Him in the day-to-day slog of life. Thankfully His mercies are new every morning.

More time on the couch, sitting still, should mean more time to read, and it has. It also should mean more time listening to my  children. Visiting with friends. Definitely more time writing. But apart from finishing a novella (a companion story to one of my full-length novels), a handful of blog posts, and helping friends with critiques, the writing has been sadly lacking.

Five weeks on the couch, and not even a single post on my personal blog. After all, what would I have to say that anyone really cares about?

What a lie.

God has been challenging me to dismantle several of those lately. What always startles is me how lies come in layers, and just when you’ve taken off one or two, and gotten comfortable with your skin being all bare and tender, another surfaces.

So I’m thinking, while I’m here–and I’m going to be here for a while! I might as well do something. Start sharing again, here. Not too quickly at first–slow and steady is better than a rash of posts and then nothing. But I must come to terms with the fact that, regardless of the billions of voices in this world, it is not for nothing that God has given me a voice.