this too, is God...

Ugh…I just love Thanksgiving and I can’t believe that it’s come and gone again already! This year, for reasons that are above and beyond obvious, I felt an overwhelming sense of gratitude towards the relative stability that our life is experiencing at this moment!! Most people don’t deem “boring” as a good thing but I will happily take it any day of the week and twice on Sunday!

One of the highlights of my weekend (amongst many) was a very long overdue visit with one of my most favourite people in the entire world. We both drove in to downtown yesterday morning for what was intended to be a brief coffee date but ended up being over three hours (and a landslide of lattés!) of much needed catching up. We had both recently experienced a rather tumultuous turn of events with certain people in our lives and were now coping with the fallout and disappointment of realizing that some relationships are simply not what you thought they were. Over the course of our discussion though, we also came to realize that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; that amongst the rather spontaneous splash of drama that suddenly descends upon your life, there also lies a discreet reminder of all the things that truly do matter in life…and an endless banter back and forth about who did what and when is certainly not one of them!

I am notorious for caring too much. Ever since I was a little girl, it’s always mattered too much to me what other people think. In the last few years though, I have realized what a completely useless worry this had been and how much of my energy was being wasted caring about people who simply didn’t care about me. I do still find myself being blind sighted a lot of the time with such incidents though and that alone tends to take my breath away. I was still recovering from the blow to the stomach when I met up with my dear friend. In fact, it had been weighing on my mind for most of the weekend. But this morning, I woke up feeling like an entirely different person…a lighter person, a happier person…a person who had been looking at things in all the wrong light!!

When my friend and I began talking about our situations more, we both found that we were focusing too much on the negative; on the hurt, on the retaliation, on all the things that didn’t go right. All the while, we were overlooking the quiet blessing that also came with it all. The reality of our combined situations was the same; we had both been trying to rescue relationships that didn’t want to be saved…chasing people that didn’t want to be caught. We were devoting time, energy and emotion to people that didn’t hold us in the same regard. We were trying to communicate with someone that didn’t want to be spoken to and most ridiculous of all is that we were doing all of this while our actual friends stood by watching, like parents just waiting for the boy band hype to pass!!! This realization pounced on us part way through our coffee date and just like that, we suddenly felt like we had just come across our ex-boyfriends on the street while having had the very best hair day one could possibly ask for!!!! Brilliant!

Of course, it’s never easy to part ways with anyone…especially in a hurtful manner but its life. You simply can’t control other people’s moods, reactions or insecurities. Half of how a relationship will turn out (or half of how a relationship will end!) is dependent on where the other person is in their life. You can throw all your weapons down or you can throw them all at the other person and it still doesn’t change the fact that everyone has their own share of accountability to carry in this world.

But in the end, what does this all mean? It means that this too, is God. It means that with the loss of one relationship (that really wasn’t that good for me to begin with) I am freed to devote my time to the amazing people in my life that don’t actually need to be caught. I am reminded to take my eyes off the one that didn’t work and refocus on the ones that do. I am humbled to what friendship really means in this day and age and I intend to play my part in continuing to make them sincere. I am encouraged to walk away from all things unhappy, unkind and unhealthy because I can only be me…imperfections and all.

Mostly though, it means that this past Thanksgiving, I wasn’t just thankful for the relationships that mean the world to me…but I was also thankful for the relationships that didn’t manage to make it that far because in the end, they provide the perfect opportunity to remember and appreciate the ones that do.

{Oh…it also means that there are very few problems in life that Starbucks can’t fix!! But we already knew that!}