While I was in Texas, I promised you that I would shortly be posting a love story that I had been working on for some time. I\u2019m sad to say that, in fact, I won\u2019t be posting that story. At least not in the coming months.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s a story that I really want to tell\u2026in some ways, it\u2019s the <\/i>story that I want to tell. It\u2019s the story of how I got here, how I became a wife, a mother, and a Catholic. It\u2019s the story that I had in the back of my mind when I began this blog, and it\u2019s the story that, in one way or another, I\u2019ve been trying to tell through poems and short stories for the last six years.<\/p>\n
And it\u2019s the one story that I just can\u2019t tell. Not yet, at least.<\/p>\n
In the past, I\u2019ve known that my efforts to tell this story were not going to be fruitful. The choices I made and the results of those choices were agonizing for me as well as everyone close to me. It was the darkest time of my life, and I spent several years just trying to live with the consequences. Working back through it wasn\u2019t an option; it was only the last two years that I\u2019ve even allowed myself to remember it all. But in the last few months I\u2019ve began actively re-considering it, shaping and forming it into a story that I could tell. A story about true love, and about the truest love of all. I fashioned, re-fashioned, edited, slashed, added and polished this story. Yet no matter what I added or what I took out, there was something about it that wasn\u2019t quite right. It was something about the tone, something about the voice telling it\u2026something about my <\/i>voice\u2026that just wasn\u2019t right. It wasn\u2019t until I gave it to my father-in-law, the Ever-Teacher, to read that I understood the problem.<\/p>\n
As usual, the Ever-Teacher didn\u2019t mince words. He let me know in no uncertain terms exactly what the problem was, and it was a problem I didn\u2019t want to face. But if I\u2019m ever to be honest, not only as a writer but as a wife, mother, daughter and child of God, it\u2019s a problem I must face.<\/p>\n
The problem is that in so many ways I\u2019m still too close to that girl who made some terrible choices not too long ago. I don\u2019t mean close in time, or close in memory; she seems light-years away now. And in many ways she is, but not in the way that matters the most.<\/p>\n
What I mean is this: those sins that are rooted deeply in me, the ones that drove me to make those choices with no consideration for the consequences for myself, let alone for others, are still very much present in me. I had begun to think that I had conquered them, that I had arrived, in a way, into a state of\u2026what? Sinlessness? Surely not, but at least a state where I didn\u2019t have to consciously consider my sins and attempt to work on them all the time. Most of the time I could skate by, secure in the knowledge that I was okay.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019m not okay. There are still so many things about myself that I must look at unflinchingly before I can write this story with any clarity, so many sins that I am still allowing to poison my thoughts, actions and words. They are the same sins that allowed me to wreak such havoc six years ago, and my failure to truly take them on is still wreaking havoc today. It\u2019s on a smaller and less noticeable scale, but the damage is there. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll ever conquer these sins. They are crosses I must bear in this life, but I won\u2019t be able to write the story I want to write until I\u2019m truly bearing those crosses.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t know how long it will be until I can tell you that story. It may be six months or six years, but I\u2019ll do it one day.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While I was in Texas, I promised you that I would shortly be posting a love story that I had been working on for some time. I\u2019m sad to say that, in fact, I won\u2019t be posting that story. At least not in the coming months. It\u2019s a story that I really want to tell\u2026in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1110,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[71,13],"class_list":["post-329","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-gradualism","tag-sin"],"yoast_head":"\n