m.i.a.

That's kinda how I've been feeling lately, especially with my church community. Verge and I have been suffering people and event exhaustion/oversaturation over the last number of months, and unfortunately, one of the things that's suffered as a result is our church attendance. Don't get me wrong, we love our church - the people, the services, everything - it's just that when you get to Sunday morning and it's the only day off Vergil and I have together and we've spent the whole week in the presence of various different people, it gets a little hard to get ourselves out of bed and into the presence of still more people.

As you can probably guess, both Vergil and I are introverts at heart. If you don't know us very well and have only ever met us in a social setting, you might not think that of us, but at the end of the day, we give energy away in social settings and don't really glean any for ourselves. We need to be away from people to recharge.

It's funny, I had a monstrously busy October and I distinctly remember saying to myself, I'm swearing off people for the month of November. Yeah, that didn't happen so much. And trying to not be social in December is next to impossible since everybody (including me) likes to 'catch up' during the holidays.

I don't know. I'm trying out this new mind-set of not owing people. Basically, I've spent a good portion of my life living like I owe everybody myself, my talents and my abilities. I have been given this that and the other thing, and therefore, I owe it to other people to use those things to help them. It occurred to me a few months ago that at the end of the day, that's a pretty big lie. As far as I am aware, I have made exactly two commitments in my life that I am expected to keep until the day I die - one to God and one to my husband. If I 'owe' anything to anyone, those would be the two parties who would qualify. (I'm including my child in the latter commitment, because part of my wedding vows included providing a safe, loving home for any children Verge and I might have. So I guess that makes three parties.) That's not to say I can then ignore the "second greatest commandment - to love my neighbour as myself", but if I'm doing things for people strictly out of a sense of obligation rather than love, then it's the wrong motivation. And if I'm doing things for others with a mind or a body that are in any way unhealthy, unbalanced or unboundaried, then I'm still getting it wrong and could potentially be doing serious damage to my two life-long commitments.

I'm not sure if that makes any sense. I'm still working out the repercussions of this myself and I know I'm not getting it right nine times out of ten, but I still feel...liberated somehow. It's done a lot to help calm down my 'guilt microwave' - my tendency to instantly feel guilty over things that I don't necessarily need to feel guilty over.

Anyway, my apologies to any of our friends who have felt neglected by us. We are and we're not intentionally avoiding you. We will try and see you before Christmas if we can - if not, our January is looking pretty open so far...