People may wonder–*I* wonder–why it’s taken me so long to get over some things. Part of it is that I was abused in more than one church, and had been taught to doubt myself and be dependent even before that, so there’s been a lot to dig through. Part of it is that… well, think of people who were hit with a hurricane or tornado. Some sustain more damage than others.
I visualize a person who had their roof blown off looking at me, sorting through the rubble where there was once a house, now completely unrecognizable, and asking why I don’t just get a new roof. I look at them and think, ‘after this happened, I didn’t even have walls anymore. Everything was gone. YOU had a roof missing. I have a house missing. Please don’t act life my life should be just fine because yours is.’ So part of it is the amount of damage that was done.
That’s not to say that the damage is too great. People rebuild, but they will also remember. All is not lost. As many have said who’ve weathered huge storms, we survived, and we still have each other (or we still have our lives). In other words, as long as we’re still breathing, there’s hope, there’s opportunity to start over, to rebuild, to restore. Sometimes we have to start by sifting through the rubble, then slowly rebuilding from the ground up. Other times we just need to throw a roof back on, or replace a few windows.
Either way, if we’ve lived through the storm we will not be the same. Storms, beautiful, powerful, frightening, and uncontrollable, come to all of us. Some may get a couple shingles knocked off. A few branches may fall from their trees. Others… others come out of their shelters after the storm and discover that they don’t even recognize the landscape anymore. But they rebuild. They continue. They don’t move on–years later they calculate time based on the year of the storm, but they do move forward. Sometimes slowly, sometimes more quickly, all depending on how close they were to it’s center.
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