When things don’t happen in order

ORDER

I wish life would go in the order we want it to.

I realize — with the Five Minute Friday site being one populated primarily by people of faith — that much of the sentiment of anyone reading this is that there is a divine power that knows what order things are supposed to happen in. I hope that same divine power is willing to deal with a little (lot of) angst about the times things don’t work out.

I almost wrote to a prompt from Kat Bouska that was, “Write about something that surprised you.” I could have done that too. Apologies for being cryptic. There are some amazing, wonderful surprises in our lives (like the friend I reconnected with today after years). There are also some that punch you in the gut (metaphorically).

Within our close family circle, there is a situation where life events feel so completely out of order.

For me personally, this summer has held at least one “wow, this isn’t what I expected” situation, and I’m finding it pretty hard to put the emotions about that change into a neutral place.

To focus on the “not what I expected” for now —

I heard an interview this morning that Krista Tippett conducted with Glennon Doyle and Abby Wambach. Doyle was talking about how difficult it is to let our children “have their pain” (instead of rushing in to try to alleviate it).

“Everything’s a pattern. It’s first the pain, then the waiting, then the rising — over and over and over again. Pain, waiting, rising. And when we skip the pain, we just never get to this rising … And courage is borne of that, just surrendering to the process.”

I hate the waiting part. Hate it (even though I know it’s valid). I’ve always likened it to a snake swallowing a large animal — there’s zero way to rush the process. The big being has to get squeezed through the snake’s body and there’s no amount of rushing that will make things go any faster.

I think I blew my five minutes when I went to look up the Doyle/Wambaugh quote.

Oh well, waiting won’t be bound by a five-minute timer either.

Welcome to this week’s Five Minute Friday. Our instructions, via coordinator Kate Motaung: “Write for five minutes on the word of the week. This is meant to be a free write, which means: no editing, no over-thinking, no worrying about perfect grammar or punctuation.” (But I can’t resist spell-checking, as you can imagine.)