Things old and new

I am a writer. And I should write more fiction, in whatever form presents itself, because if I don't have that kind of outlet I tend to write my life. "I will say this, and then so-and-so will say that, and then I will reply...." I can get very invested in these shadow extensions of people with familiar faces. More than once I've mourned when reality dissolved them. More than once I've held back from people out of the fear of simply inventing them to my liking.

I am a reader. Maybe I should have read less, because somewhere along the line I got the idea that I could read real people as easily as fictional people. It turns out that real people are far more independent than fictional people, and I've read them wrongly with enough frequency that I no longer put full confidence in my ability to read them at all.

I am an analyzer, a pattern-finder. I should remember, in an "active remembering" sort of way, that things as they were do not equal things as they are, or vice versa. I am not doomed to repeat all the same patterns I've fallen into so often before. No matter how much it feels like I am stuck in a time loop in which only external details change (underneath, the same emotions; the same thought patterns; the same sins).

I am becoming a fighter. Even if it means struggling uphill all the way, I won't let my worst tendencies master me. I will not pretend to know what you're going to do. I won't presume to know what you're thinking and will trust what you tell me. I will have faith in a God who can break patterns, interrupt cycles, turn the very sun back in its path. And if I've prayed all these times for these thorns to be removed and they have not been, I will not have the arrogance to assume that I can thwart the power of God by not believing in just the right way. His grace is sufficient. His power is perfected in weakness.

No matter how I feel from day to day, I am new. (2 Cor. 5:7)