Five Minute Friday: Whole

It's been a few weeks since I've joined up with the Five Minute Friday community, so if this gets a little rambly, y'all bear with me, okay? I'm a bit out of practice. If you'd like to join and write something on this week's prompt word, head over to Kate's blog Heading Home and link up at the bottom of this week's post.

Whole

There are so many things I could write about with this word, but I think I'm just going to kind of ramble and pray that it all kinda melds together into one coherent thought. The first thing I thought about when I saw the prompt word is that I haven't felt whole in a long time. I think the last time I felt really, truly whole was when I was pregnant with our eldest daughter, M2. We'd been married for about six months when she was conceived and I was overjoyed at the prospect of becoming a mother for the first time. Everything seemed right in my world, in my life, and within myself. I was happy and healthy -- physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

I have struggled for most of my life with feeling broken. I've been broken because of bullying, low self-esteem, a lifetime of obesity, emotional abuse, mental illness (my own and that of close family), self-injury, suicidal thoughts and attempts, and spiritual wounds. When I met Gray and our friendship began, I was on my journey to the Catholic Church. As I went along that path, I began to see those spiritual wounds being healed and in Gray, I found a kind of love and acceptance that was a balm to many of my emotional hurts and scars. When we married, I felt a sense of wholeness that I hadn't ever thought possible -- and yet, there remained pieces of me that were broken, although I didn't see it at the time.

Those broken pieces have sharp, jagged edges that continue to cut me apart and tear at my desires to be truly whole. Despite my journey to Catholicism, I've had some of those old spiritual wound scars be reopened in the last three years by circumstances and situations out of my control. Thankfully, Fr. B, my spiritual director, has been helping me -- slowly though it seems to go -- to get at the deeper roots of those spiritual wounds so that I can find not just healing for the superficial tears in my spirit, but a deeper spiritual wholeness.

Emotionally, I am definitely a long way from whole. I've struggled mightily with this task that I felt the Holy Spirit set before me to read and meditate on the Psalms each day and write about it in this blog. Some of that is due to spiritual healing that still needs to take place, but a lot of it is that my brain and body are so tired from fighting depression constantly for the last three years that I have many days that I do good to just be awake and vertical instead of in bed.

I want to be whole again. I want to enjoy my life again. I want to have hope that I can be whole someday. Right now it's not all darkness, but what light I see at the end of the tunnel is a tiny pinprick that is so far away that I cannot fathom the distance. It might as well not be there at all as far away as it is. But that tiny pinprick is what keeps me alive. When I can see it, I can think of the possibility of wholeness. When I can't, then I can't see wholeness for anyone and all seems lost. So I focus on that pinprick of light and keep following my big brother Chez's advice to put one foot in front of the other.

Maybe one day, I'll step out of this dark tunnel and emerge through that pinprick into the light of wholeness. With my luck, that won't be in this life, but will only happen once I've shuffled off this mortal coil. I suppose there is actually truth in that statement. I mean as humans, we're all broken by sin and our broken and sinful world. We may do our best to rid ourselves of sin, but we still fall victim to the sins of others and the messed up way the world works because of the effects of original sin. The only cure for the messiness of our sin sick world and its effects on all of us is Jesus. He is with us, of course, via the Holy Spirit and in the Eucharist, but I don't think this world will get much better until He comes again. So maybe wholeness in this life is something to be sought after, but not to be received until He comes again.

I don't know. I don't have all the answers. I just know what my heart yearns for -- to be fully and completely whole in Him.