Brave Enough To Be Bliss

Chapter 8 — The Shack

“Instead of avoiding your pain, work through it. Instead of withholding your tears, let them flow. Instead of closing your heart, open it. Instead of expressing hate, show love. Instead of judging another, appreciate them. Instead of being uptight and serious, be playful. Instead of fearing the unknown, move into it.” Jake Woodward When I initially talked to the owner of the rental property on the phone asking if his place was available for my writing trip to Michigan, he hesitated for a moment. I panicked, thinking it wasn’t. But then with a slight tone of, “I have no idea why you’d want to be here that long this time of year,” he said it was available since typically no one is interested in renting it during those months, other than maybe a hunter here and there for a couple days. I was immediately excited and knew it was meant to be. Now everything had fallen into place for me to be able to make the trip and stay there.

When I opened the email attachment to print out the rental agreement, my mouth dropped open when I saw the name of the property.

Seven years ago when my book group wanted to go see the movie, The Shack , I agreed to go, but in the way you do when you hope you happen to get deathly ill at the last minute so you can’t go but don’t have to lie about it. The movie was

released in March of 2017, and we saw it March 25. I know it was March 25 because just now while writing I decided to go back and look at emails and see if I could find the date instead of again saying, “I don’t remember specifically when something happened. ” This turned out to be another time I wished I hadn’t been able to find an email, as I found more incriminating evidence of what a liar I was, or as Ginger might have me rephrase it, how unsafe I felt to tell the truth. Remember the first sentence above about how I hoped to be deathly ill the night of the movie, and then read this below.

From: Ginger Bliss To: Book Group Thu, Mar 2, 2017 at 10:38 AM I SO want to see that movie, but already have plans each evening. : ( I’m sure not proud of it, but this is an example of what I did. I couldn’t just say, I think this movie is going to be too tough for me to watch, so I’ll pass. They were having trouble coming up with a date that worked for everyone, so I waited to see what everyone else would say and then chimed in at the end sounding all positive. They were all excited to see it and had already made comments about it related to their spiritual views, so I figured I should want to see it, but I didn’t want to see it and couldn’t let them know that. So yeah, rather than be honest, this is the type of thing I did. I said things like, “I SO want to see that movie…” even when it was the very last thing I wanted to do. Ugh, it’s so hard to see thin gs like that in writing. To see the lengths that I would go to in order to appear like I had myself together, to appear however I thought they wanted me to be and to fit in. I didn’t want to draw any attention to myself, so going along with whatever everyone else wanted was just what I did.

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