November 10, 2008

November 10, 2008

This last weekend, I went on a retreat with a class at Emmanuel House. Here those of us that went spent time telling the group our individual stories, and the group spent time asking questions of the person telling the story in order that they could get to know them better, and that the person being asked might see something of themselves that had previously been hidden to them. This experience was a very, very positive one for me. This retreat was the first time in my life that I have experienced true, sincere, deep fellowship with my brothers and sisters in Christ. There was a love and warmth there that I'd not felt before ever. And, to top it all off, I learned a few things about myself that I'd either been ignoring, or that I just hadn't seen before.

One of these things is that I am, due to several different factors, fairly lonely, and that fact affects the way in which I interact with people and view relationships. I would go into it further, but I don't have much time. A second thing I learned about myself (and this I learned through reflection on the weekend after I got home) is that I have a compulsion to present a front to other, but more relevantly, myself of a person who has it all together. Some of the people at the retreat that weekend saw this in me and let me know. And I later saw this in myself as I looked back at the way I reacted to people observations to my story and what they saw in me. To use an example, one of the comments was that I tend to volunteer to serve when there is a group of people working. I do this, in part, because I yearn to be among people because I am lonely inside (and have been for a long time). As a reaction to this, knowing that they saw I was lonely when I volunteered to serve, I initially pulled back from serving, in order to hide my vulnerability. I need to learn to embrace being able to live through who I am now, who my circumstances have made me, and let people interact and love who I really am, not who I think I need to be, or who I want them to see. It's difficult for me to be vulnerable. I'm not exactly sure why.