Reflections

5 years ago, I started blogging. I had another blog before this one, with three years worth of entries and contacts with fellow bloggers.

2 years ago I stopped blogging. Our lives were to painfully effected by the economic down turn, and so many things were turned upside down and all around. I wasn't about to share the details with the world, much less bring myself to divulge the details to personal friends. Reading about every one else's happy times and "oh my gosh I had the worst day, the dog escaped and we spent an hour chasing him..." I am the proud owner of a new dog, and yes that would throw a monkey wrench in the day, but that is not the worst day, not by a long shot. I couldn't read their joys and their stress. Not when it all seemed so far away from my reality, not when it seemed so unfair.

But I didn't stop writing. I filled a book with prayers and verses, pleadings and hopes and heart ache. And some funny things too. I wish I would have kept on writing the quirkiness of our family so that I had the record. But life gets tangled. And some parts are so hard, you cannot write the joys without writing the pain. And I suppose tucking the joys away into my own heart were the closest I could get to untangling the painful jumble all around.

Last week I started blogging. Who knows why. Maybe it is sence or just the hope that the hardest part is over, or at least the most painful days have passed. Regardless, it is nice to have a thread of the joys and struggles that unfold each day as my children spring up.

Last night I decided to check on some of my old blogging friends. What I found shocked me. "This blog is private"; "this link is inactive" or there simply were no posts for the last year or two. Of ten different blogs that I used to read every day, only one was active. And most of the recent posts were reposts from a year or two or three ago.

And I began to wonder why? Was life just to busy, or did funny things about toddlers turn into not so funny things when the second grade teacher read about the way you heard her yelling at the kids from the hallway. (that never happened to me, just incase my boy's teachers every find and read my blog, I have NEVER heard them yell. They are all sweet and wonderful and brillant and patient. Seriously. They are!) Did the aninomity just get to tangled with the not-so- anonomous, or was it the struggle of loosing jobs and dwellings that begin to bite to closely to others as well?

I spoke with a friend last week, who knows some of the struggle we've walked. And I was shocked that she knew a little of that same struggle first hand. And I was ashamed that in protecting my pain, I checked out so far from not only blogging, but also real life friends. I withdrew and I forgot that I wasn't the only one with had things going on.

Maybe an open blog isn't the right venue for sharing heart ache and loss; who knows, maybe it's just the thing. But I do know real life friends are definantly the right venue for sharing your sarrow; they are nessasary.

I hope each of those virtual friends who've stepped behind pass-word protected walls, or who have simply turned off their blogs and walked away, I hope each one of them has done it for happy reasons. But for those who find themselves behind one sort of a wall or another because of difficulty and pain, please oh please do not let the walls in your "real" life get to high. You are hardly alone, and I do not know a time in my own life that finds us needing humanity and good friends to lean on, more than these times. There is nothing like a friend who will cry and laugh with you and share your pains and joys. Don't keep those pains to hidden in your own heart, because they are easier to bear with another, and they are so much less sufficating once you let them out. For me the hardest thing about sharing difficulty is the fear that no one else has ever faced it. But I have faced it. I am surviving it. And if you should be finding yourself there as well, you are certainly not alone.

It is imposible to know strength without having struggled. And it is imposible to know joy without first knowing pain.

May a brighter day find us all, strong and joyfull, the bitter night having passed for a glorious dawn.

Hannah