A Beautiful Tapestry of Inadequacies

This past year had been a challenge both professionally and personally.   For reasons not all clear to me, feelings of inadequacies set in and clouded my year.  I was troubled by the challenges that I felt were being propelled at me in seeking to live and understand my faith. 

 This past year brought us a Pope, who if nothing else, challenges us by word and example how to live a joyful and humble Christian life. Due in a great part to his words,  I have begun to question what I am called to do and how I am meant to live. Time and again, I hear something our Pope has said (or done) that resonates deeply with my soul. I have been filled with a much deeper awareness of those who suffer only to find myself caught in the abyss of my doubts and fears, trying to determine how it is that I am called to action.   My insecurities and feelings of inadequacies abound. 

The past 8-10 years have been difficult for my family which, after many deep losses, is basically now just me and my son. My parents are both gone. My husbands parents gone for many years now. My husband of 24 years died eight years ago of a massive heart attack at 48. The hardest part of that has been watching helplessly to what this has done to our son who was  two days from turning 11 when his father died. It was my son and I who found him the night he died.   We  were returning  home from a night of religious education classes.  

  I have given countless hours and most of my finances in trying to get our son help to deal with the aftermath of this trauma. But to no avail. He is bitter, angry, and filled with resentment. He has lost all respect for Christianity and especially the Catholic faith (in his mind,  he assumes if we had not been at classes, things might be different). He pretty much has lost all respect for himself as well. Those who know me well, know the extents that I have gone to try to reach him and to try and get him help. But as I learned with our medical system about three years ago, at the age of 16, he has to agree to the help. Nothing I can say or do can force him into treatment he does not want (Unless he is deemed a harm to himself or others is what the law states) And although everything he chooses to do is destructive to himself spiritually, mentally and even physically it is not legally harmful enough. Because these issues are his personal life and I wish to respect that, I will not elaborate anymore other than to say that. watching his self-destructive behavior has taken its toll on me. I am almost out of options, other than prayer.   At almost 19 years old now, it is a journey that I fear he must walk on his own. .

 So I move forward in this new year, feeling called to do more with sharing my faith, only to acknowledge I have failed miserably in that task with my own child. For nothing I say or do seems to matter nor seems to have a bearing on his life choices anymore.  I am faced with letting go. Not an easy task for a parent.  The years of therapy, the doctor bills, the other trouble and consequences he has faced are now part of the fabric of a tattered past.    I just pray that the remnants and threads I have provided him over the years will hold together until he seeks to restore the tapestry of his own life. Don't worry, there are lots of prayers still happening on this end.

So it is with my 'new year revolution' that I move to embrace my inadequacies and weave them into the patchwork of a new future.  A tapestry which is layered with the rich and vibrant colors of uncertainty, carefully and beautifully stitched in the design of insecurities and delicately woven and held together with a faith that binds all things.    

Cyndi
by Cyndi Marlow

You formed my inmost being;
you knit me in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, because I am wonderfully made;
wonderful are your works!
My very self you know. - Psalm 139:13-14

St. Monica pray for us!