I WAS WRONG.
Three little words.
I’ve been thinking about them a lot lately.
I was wrong.
Not so much about politics or marketing or how to repair a relationship.
Definitely been wrong about those.
I’ve also been wrong about me.
When something hurts me … when something scares me …. when something reminds me of a past wound … that wound’s voice becomes the loudest one in the room.
That voice creates a story about me … trying to make the hurt somehow make sense.
But what if that voice is telling the wrong story?
What if when I’m angry, I’m actually grieving?
What if when I feel foolish, I’m actually loving?
What if when I feel like I’m too much, I’m really just carrying too much?
What if feeling wrong is a call to consider loving and trusting my truest self?
A lens of love and understanding will always reveal a different perspective. And as for me and my house, I can always use a more compassionate perspective.
I have a front row seat to the some of the most beautiful, wholesome, heart-wrenching scenes. My family, my friends and my counseling office hold stories of heroism, beauty, tragedy, dignity, agony and glory. I am daily inspired by the resilience revealed within the honest, raw conversations happening. And yet I sit with amazing people every day who believe they are broken. I can’t help but think what it would be like if they saw themselves the way I see them. I find myself longing to write a book about these heroic people and their amazing stories. I can see the hopeful possibilities waiting to unfold in later chapters. I feel the promise of meaningful, beautiful endings.
When I left my job as a chaplain and counselor for hospice, I made myself sit down and write story after story about the beautiful people I had the honor of walking with as they made their way through their dying. I was a witness to such sacred spaces, they had to be recorded. I never want to forget.
I feel the same now. One of the many reasons I created The Sacred Way groups was because I imagined the beautiful people I know and love meeting the other beautiful people and all of us seeing our holy humanity alongside our common struggles. Being seen and known is such special territory. It helps tell a truer story. When someone notices our essence, we brighten a little in the light of that love.
I remember two of my best friends sitting on the floor with me while I sobbed. Makeup smeared, red, splotchy face, swollen eyes and they said they had never seen me look more beautiful. Somehow I believed them. They saw me. Maybe that’s what love does. It sees what we don’t always see by ourselves.
I am noticing that when I consider the words, I AM WRONG …. about myself, about that harsh voice in my head, the deep dark doubt, the critical eye, the meanest perspective …. it allows me to take a deep breath and reconsider my situations, my relationships, my life.
When I get lost, I have usually wandered off the path of me. I am thinking of my professor and oh how I wish I counseled more like him. I compare myself to a colleague and sink in discouragement for how I don’t measure up. I dig up a painful memory and ruminate on regret and remorse. Those stories become a disturbing hum rattling my confidence. Such a familiar, historical hum … It’s as if I have known this tune all my life.
But when I consider that the rattling hum of negative voices might be wrong, I experience the slightest, subtlest, softest shift that feels and smells like hope. I am able to imagine something different for a moment and an idea or an insight will come that feels different. Sometimes that is just enough to get me back on the path to my true self.
On that path, the noise of doubt and discouragement no longer drown out the mystical moments. I get to see a sweet bird who shows up singing a little message or the gift of Rush canceling their concert on a really hard day.
My dad used to tell me “Beth, consider the source” when criticisms came.
Those words have always helped.
I’m considering the source. It’s me.
And maybe
I’ve been wrong.
