Lost and Found, Part 1

"And who is this?  She looks like someone I know,
but she has been lost for a long time."

Once upon a time, there was a girl, a girl whose tender heart and willing spirit were being cultivated by Jesus himself.  As a tweener, her social calendar was relatively empty, and when her youth group planned summer activities, she naturally attended.  The activities were often service-centered, and it was here that the girl first learned that doing something for others with the right group of people can be even more fun than doing whatever you want.  One of these activities was picking blueberries.  The blueberries were then sold, and the funds raised sent to Uganda, which the girl learned was a country on the continent of Africa.  In Uganda, there were kids her age who wanted to go to summer camp, but had no way of paying to attend.  How a few dozen pounds of blueberries were going to solve this problem, the girl wasn't sure.  But the grown-ups said it mattered, and picking blueberries seemed like a lot more fun than fighting over the tv remote with her little brother, so she went.  And then she watched as people bought the blueberries at church on Sunday.

And time passed.  And the woman who came with them to pick the blueberries came back to the girl's Sunday School class, and showed them pictures of the kids in Uganda going to "Blueberry Camp."  The kids and the camp were unlike anything the girl had ever seen before.  Another grown-up who went to camp with the Blueberry Lady shared that she was making dolls for the little girls in Uganda to play with, dolls that had brown skin and dark hair like they did.  And the girl thought, I can do that.  I can make dolls.  Where this thought came from, and why she suddenly felt compelled to contribute, can only be attributed to the Holy Spirit.  Her mediocre sewing skills and mounting frustration when the project turned out to be more difficult than she thought can only be attributed to her long line of strong-willed, stubborn female relatives.  But persist she did, and in addition to learning that you always have to remember to account for the space the seam takes up, she learned that giving something requires sacrifice, even if it is only a couple summer afternoons and some complex mental math.

And time passed.  And the girl continued to work on the dolls as she could, and before long she had completed three or four.  Eventually, she gave them to the Blueberry Lady, who promised they would go with her to Uganda next time she went to camp.  And that was that, or so the girl thought.

Limits

They tell you to know your limits.
To know when to say yes, and when to say no.
To know when you can indeed accomplish those three little things, and when to call in reinforcements.
To know when you can drive home, and when you need to hand the keys over.
To know when to sneak in that last word, and when to walk away.
To know when to keep digging and searching, and when to stop pushing and prodding.

I know exactly how far I can go when it comes to self-reflection.  The line between fulfilling spiritual duty and making real discoveries is thin, but I know where it is.  I know how it feels, both physically and mentally, to be approaching that line.  The pace of my thoughts begins to race.  I imagine the words bouncing around the inside of my skull, because that's how it actually feels.  My temples begin to ache. My throat tightens.  My shoulders hunch.  Heaven help me if I've eaten anything recently.  The tears build and threaten to spill if anything taunts them.

The reason they teach us to know our limits is for the sake of self-preservation, right?  To avoid car accidents and mental breakdowns and fist fights, right?  To prevent us from digging into our pain when we really shouldn't, like when we're tired or scared or not thinking well, right?

But what if the good practice of knowing our limits has created a culture that's scared of the other side? I'm not saying I want to know what's on the other side of all of these examples, but I think that I've spent so long protecting myself from, well, myself, that I don't know what to do with the pain in my life.  I've known my limits forever.  And for the most part, I've been able to control them.  But not now.  In the last week, waves of grief and pain have literally washed over me several times, without much warning and certainly without any ability to control them.  And it's terrifying.  Not so much because I'm afraid of the pain itself, but because I'm afraid of how it got there.  How long has it been lingering?  How long have I been ignoring it, and how many times will I have to process it before it leaves me?  I have found that my so-called self-preservation scheme is making it harder for me to deal with loss and pain, both from the past and in the present.  I'd like to change that for my future.  And it seems like the only way is to ignore the limit, in the proper time and space and place.  But it needs to happen.  Because this is one limit that's not helping me live.