Ornaments - An Intro into Shara

      

 I began the journey into my soul searching a few years ago, and it has all led me here… today, to this moment. How I got here, well, that’s a much longer story than any of us have time for, so I will tell it like this:

        From early on in life, I learned to…… well…. Let me put it this way…

        You know when you have a Christmas tree, and over the years, you collect ornaments. Over time, you begin each Christmas season, placing each ornament on the tree, each one representing a moment in time, a memory for you, for your kids, or even better, for the whole family. You know, the one you got on that vacation of a lifetime that you took your kids on, just ONE time in their entire childhood. Every year when you place that ornament on the tree, you smile and remember that trip, those memories, those moments. Year by year, one by one, ornaments are added, along with memories of good times. Then, inevitably, the day comes when maybe the dog runs by, or something rips your attention away right as you are about to place that special ornament on the tree – and you drop it. It shatters, and your heart breaks – even if it’s just for a moment, a piece of that memory is forever gone from your hands.

        Now, a normal person, who is well equipped and mature enough to handle it, will sweep up the mess, take a moment to remember all the moments that that small token represented… and then move on to putting the rest of the ornaments on the tree, reliving those other beautiful memories.

        Not me.

        No, I cried when I dropped the ornament, I moved stuff around to make it look like it was ok, but I never swept up the glass. I never cleaned it up. I moved it around so that no one would notice, then continued decorating… all along, pretending as if I never dropped anything, therefore I never lost anything. Then, it was only a matter of time, over the months and years to come, that another ornament was tragically shattered. I went to sweep it up, but I couldn’t, it was too hard, instead I just moved it around too, shoved it up under scattered gifts, and tree skirts…. Hoping the kids, the husband, the family wouldn’t notice the missing ornament…. the missing “thing/things”. Then it got worse over the next few months and years to come…. I didn’t realize, that while I never actually cleaned up the mess, and continued to decorate the tree….. over time, the bottoms of my feet were starting to burn and ache with pain – clearly indicating that something was wrong, needed to be addressed, possibly a cut from a broken piece of glass that was left unattended and might be turning into an infection. I should have seen someone for help when the pain first started. But I didn’t. I cleaned the wounds from the broken glass, did what I could to protect the cuts, and since the infection seemed to start to clear up, I thought “I must be ok!”.

        So I continued. Year after year, the same thing and every few years, sometimes more often than others, but it would seem to almost always happen – one would always break, to the point where, I began to worry, or wonder, “which one will be next?”

But still, I took pride in my ability to keep going, through the pain, through the heartache and even the infection… I was good. So, after deciding I was done healing, I got right back to it. "I must continue the tradition", I would tell myself; I must keep the memories alive and try to keep the things as much like they have always been as possible…. Just don’t let the kids know it’s missing, don’t let them find out that mom dropped another ornament. So of course, I continued, I tried to continue to be the sole caretaker of the family memories… my childhood, their childhood, my friendships, their friendships, the loved one's I lost, and the loved one's they lost... it was mostly all still there, hanging on the tree…. No one should notice the missing pieces.

But I did.

I continued, each year hanging ornaments, dropping some here and there and covering it up as best as I could… I stepped on some glass occasionally, that was a little extra sting… but I got through it. I carried the ornaments all so carefully, each step was measured, each effort took all my focus and time, I HAD to protect them. But as always, another would fall, another would shatter…. And again, I would brush it around, hope no one noticed and keep going. Until my feet were so infected from the years and years of untreated wounds, and all the cuts from the ornaments dropped over the years.

It was too late.

I couldn’t help but wonder, while I sat there in the midst of my broken glass ornaments, the ones that shattered and I never cleaned up - over my entire lifetime. With tears streaming down my face, collapsed on the floor in utter pain and despair…. What would have happened if I had actually dealt with the mess from the beginning. What if I swept it up, mourned it, said goodbye and then continued to decorate with the beautiful ornaments I had left? I was so in so much pain, focused on what I dropped and what I lost, that I forgot to clean up my mess, or the mess that was left by whatever event that day caused the ornament to fall. Instead, I pretended it didn’t happen. I got infected, calloused feet, that only felt pain, nothing else. All the beauty I was surrounded by, and all I could see and feel were my cut up, infected feet – because I never dealt with the loss of what I loved to begin with. Had I cleaned up the glass, addressed what I lost, felt the pain from the loss, and moved on – life would have gone much differently for me, my tree would have still been beautiful, and all would have been ok, everyone would have been just fine.

I hobbled around sick, limping and broken for most of my adult life…. Sometimes from ornaments I broke and didn’t clean up…. Sometimes from others around me who, out of carelessness or hatefulness - but either way, those were broken too….and, I didn’t clean those up then either.

So, this is where I found myself at the end of one journey, and the beginning of a whole new journey. Once I realized the infection was there, found the source of the infection and finally cleaned it up the right way, the healing started immediately. THIS is the story I want to share with you, THIS is the story of healing and hope, like you have never heard it before, and maybe, just maybe there will be some nuggets along the way that help you through your times when your ornaments seem to shatter, or even when they do shatter. Even if you end up like me, sitting amongst shards of broken glass, with bleeding wounds and infection wracking your body, with no sign of hope in sight…. Know that the fact that I am here, sharing this with you today, is proof, that God is a healer of the wounded, He is near to the brokenhearted, and I am living, breathing proof of that.

I look forward to sharing my story with you. It is a story of from hurt into healing and hope, a story of grace, and a story that you can find your own story within and begin your journey to healing with me. 

*Spoiler alert: God can and Will take the broken, ugly, shattered pieces of your life, and make it into a beautiful, life breathing work or art. One where the light shining inside of it, is so bright, that it lights up all the “cracks” and “scars”, but instead of the broken, you see the light shining through where the darkness used to be.

By: Shara Lin