Wednesday's Woe - Weighted Down By the If-Only's...

Wednesday's Woe

Weighted Down By the If-Only's...

or

How do you call yourself bargaining with

"If Only's," when you really

STILL don't know the SOLUTION

(that would have changed everything),

and wouldn't recognize it if it

were STARING you in the face?

On Saturday before "Father's Day," as we were facing yet another holiday without our precious Merry Katherine, when I saw the tears on the crushed face of Tommy, I found myself immediately wracking my brain,

What could I have done to stop her from her self-destructive path so her daddy wouldn't have to feel this pain?!

When I later told Tommy what my thinking had digressed to, he observed,

You think if you could find a way to fix it, IF you could have just done something differently, you think you THEN could control the outcome and wouldn't feel so helpless...

I guess this is my bargaining still going on... I was thinking,

If I somehow could have nipped her first drug-taking in the bud, or made her change her friends, maybe this wouldn't have happened...!

Get Real.

Nip the drug-taking in the bud?

I certainly hope I did not under-react; we tried to establish the importance of having very clear boundaries - Stay away from drugs!

But in looking back, do I really think I could

"Nip the drug-taking in the bud?"

Better think again, as initial over-reaction by overly-controlling behavior could possibly push a teenager right into doing something just TO rebel (e.g., just for the sake of individuation from mommy, for one!).

Make her change her friends?

At the time, I could understand her choice of friends - they certainly didn't seem to be out-and-out criminals: They were risk-takers like her; they were physically-active, vivacious, fun people!

The people I had thought were "nice" people turned out to be stuck-up twits, in love with their own self-righteousness. She could smell that pretension miles away (and if that's who they really were, I'm glad for her discernment). And now, after her dabbling into m.a.r.i.j.u.a.n.a? They would certainly think they were "better" than her...

I can just hear a little self-righteous, pompous twit, with a hidden sin like say, an addictive eating disorder (i.e., NONE of us is perfect!), justifying herself to herself:

Marijuana?! Why, that's unacceptable! But my hidden eating disorder... No one knows, so it doesn't count. I can still hang with the self-righteous. I might even have a chance of being a LEADER of the self-righteous since I don't have a shadow-side to speak of...

...justifies the addicted, eating-disordered Pharisee to herself...

If that's who they really were...unloving Pharisees (Or was this the rationalization of a child already headed toward addictive, "stinking" thinking?),

I wouldn't have wanted to be friends with them either...

So really, we couldn't win...

Real kids with real problems OR "so-called" Christians who thought they had no problems (i.e., Pharisees who'd say,"Lord, thank you that I am not like that despicable sinner over there...") —

Even Jesus was disgusted with the latter and sought out the former.

He made it clear that living by the "letter of the law" within our own power is deadly. Legalism kills... (It certainly does, spiritually-speaking, which, in my opinion, is THE most important aspect of our lives, more important to our Savior than earthly life itself...)

And yet, it was a No-Win situation.

She was repulsed by the

unloving-folks-who-"called"-themselves-Christians, but-who-detested-the-very-people-she-cared-about, her "Jesus-on-the-street."

And yet, her choice to hang out with this other kind of friend was what ultimately...killed her...

Picture - http://twitpic.com/url2z thanks to Lilly Ann