Hugging the Cactus

When you have lived a life as long and tangled as mine, you begin to notice patterns.

Patterns in the way certain numbers resurface in the most unlikely places.

Patterns hidden in the combinations of letters and digits on license plates.

Patterns that whisper in the ways we circle back into our own cycles of self-sabotage.

If you’ve lived long enough to know how little you truly see, you’ve noticed patterns too.

Some are disguised in the lives and personalities of those around us.

Some are even more cleverly disguised in the person staring back from the mirror.

The real struggle is not in changing a pattern but in daring to identify it.

To see in ourselves what we wish were not there feels like hugging a cactus with the soul…

so raw and visceral that flaying flesh from bone seems preferable

to admitting we might be like them.

I have spent nearly my entire life picking fragments of him out of my heart.

He will remain nameless; none is worth giving.

Seeing him in my own eyes, instead of Christ’s reflection, broke me in ways words cannot hold.

When I was able, I did the only thing left to me:

I brought my ugly to God and asked Him to take the reins.

Still, I catch them…

grains clumped together, unsifted and soured versions of him –

and I am forced once more into humility, once more to ask forgiveness.

Maybe that is life: always picking out the pieces, always sifting.

But this much I know: just because it is there does not mean it must remain.

Change begins when we are willing to look beneath the surface with brutal honesty.

Change deepens when recognition is met with repentance and submission to God.

That is the only pattern worth repeating.

I make everything about Him, because to me it all Is.