Aloha

   

     A beginning and an ending.

     Just finished watching the movie, "Aloha" and it's put me in a perfect mood.

     Aloha. This idea of a hello greeting and a goodbye greeting...feels so vivid to me in this particular space and time.

     It's true. One must be willing to let go of the old to truly embrace something new. But often these changes in seasons intersect, or rather overlap in certain ways.

     And I, doing my best to rest and pay attention, feel like I'm on the tail end of one of the hardest emotional seasons I've had in a long while.

     A sense of heart pain, hopelessness, sickness, and unrest.

     But something's ending. 

     And something is beginning.

     Aloha.

     A few nights ago, Mr. "Full Attention" and I crossed paths once again.

     And my heart was soft and tender.

     To me, in my current state of affairs, it's absolutely amazing--to have an engaged and tender heart, in lieu of the previous circumstance that was an offense to my heart.

     Sometimes you just want to understand what is going on inside the head and heart of a person. And perhaps see yourself through their eyes.

     I wonder how he sees me? Or if he just looks through me, or is turned off by me?

     But that night reset something in my heart.

     It wasn't about him and me.

     Or me and anyone else for that matter.

     It was about what God was speaking to my heart.

     And I listened.

     I was challenged with the subject of Forgiveness.

     I hadn't realized how I was staying stuck in some sort of emotional heart trauma because I let bitterness stay and live in my heart. It felt good to have a target for my anger. For what has felt like a decade of injustice in the area of my personal romance and love.

     He was no saint, but he definitely got caught in my own personal crossfire.

     But now, it was time for me to Forgive.

     Aloha.

     As it's been said before, forgiveness is truly about setting your own heart free as well as releasing someone from a prison of your own making, that they are rarely cognizant of.

     It's not so much about excusing the wrong, but actually admitting it--and choosing the higher way of love for your own heart's sake.

     It truly is amazing how our hearts and minds can get stuck, once we enter into the cycle of bitterness and unforgiveness.

     Yet in order for life and love to truly thrive, Forgiveness is a non-negotiable.

     And oh the healing that it brings.

     So that night, I was challenged and invited into Forgiveness.

     And I said yes.

     This past season, I've dealt with random health scares, facing a strange man almost breaking into my house, a fender bender with a semi-truck, sleepless nights, nights full of tears, and a wrestling with my own personal destiny in God and a despondency regarding my own romance journey.

     Yet something is ending.

     And something new is beginning.

     I want to feel the embrace and breath of destiny surrounding me. I want to be held in those moments in all my vulnerability. I want his comforting hand to gently stroke my back, as he looks into my eyes, as if to search for a constellation--reading the stories which are held there. 

     It's not all said and done for you and I just yet.

     The air is still thick with Promise, although Trauma from this past season would try to step up on some two-bit soapbox and dictate its demands.

     But no.

     Something is ending. And something is beginning.

     Hello.

     Goodbye.

     Aloha.

Wisdom's Knocking:

“But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.”

― C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle