Finding Yourself Again

If you grew up in a chaotic sit­u­a­tion, you prob­a­bly spent your time coor­di­nat­ing the play­ers in the arena of your life. You tried to make sense of the mess of your exis­tence. You man­aged and sur­vived. The prob­lem is that it became your life script. You found your­self attracted to peace-making roles. You may have even found your­self in rela­tion­ship with a chaotic char­ac­ter — just to feel normal.

The chaos pro­fes­sions of coun­sel­ing, med­i­cine, law, edu­ca­tion, and min­istry are com­mon choices for “inter­ven­ers” and “peacemaker-managers.” We are used to being caught in the cross­fire. In fact, we would not know what to do if we were not in cri­sis. The price for these “heroic” roles is the loss of our essen­tial self. Sur­vival meant trad­ing off our sacred real­ity for that of others.

In the short-run it works, and then we lose our direc­tion. Some­where in mid-life we find our error. We wake up to the loss of our orig­i­nal course. One day we real­ize that we do not have to man­age the peo­ple around us. They have their call­ing; they have their Divinely-defined course and WE are in the way. Man­ag­ing them means sti­fling their jour­ney. We begin as res­cuers but end as stum­bling blocks.

Sooner or later, we must turn loose. It is an act of faith and san­ity. God is at the helm. We relin­quish our role as life’s man­ager and pick up where we left off. We may be thirty, forty, or as late as seventy-plus when we dis­cover that we hung onto a life man­ag­ing tech­nique before we resorted to faith.

It will be okay. We do not have to be the coor­di­na­tor of oth­ers’ real­ity. Get out of their way, they have lessons to learn. Find your­self again. There is no merit in tak­ing another person’s jour­ney for them.