Busted

All changes, even the most longed for, have their melancholy; for what we leave behind us is a part of ourselves; we must die to one life before we can enter another. ~ Anatole France

This quote perfectly describes what I have been experiencing recently. Through much pain and turmoil, huge amounts of impossible "coincidence", and liberal applications of unexpected and quite unmerited grace, I now shakily find myself in a place where I am:
- freed from a long marriage that, though we made it work, never could fulfill me emotionally and had abusive elements to it;
- free from the constraints of CAWKI (Church As We Know It), after serving it full-time in various forms for over 30 years;
- deeply beloved by a man whom I not only deeply love in return, but respect and learn from, genuinely like and delight in;
- free to start over again in any place we can afford to live.
So what am I grousing about? Yes, getting here took a lot of tears and pain that I wasn't expecting. But as Dad once challenged me in a previous period of great upheaval: "Remember that life you didn't want any more, that you gave me in despair? Well, look at your life now. You don't have that old life any more, do you? So what are you complaining about?"
And I remember standing in front of people attending missions training and telling them, "Yes, do count the cost. But then pay it, whatever the amount; because Kingdom life is worth it!"
Busted.
In the past weeks, I've again come to the point where my heart has been revealed to me and I find that underneath all the upheaval, rejection, pain and change of the past few years, I still do burn for one thing: the King and his Kingdom. To be sure, my ideas of what that looks like in daily living are in constant flux. But A and I both that know that before we ever knew one another, each in our own way, we had given up our "old" lives for something more, off the beaten track, to be available for the King and his Kingdom. And we both know it would never be enough for us to just live a quiet life off in a corner of England gazing into each others' eyes until we grow too old to see.
So we are back to the questions: but what? And how? And there are far more questions than answers right now. The only two things that are certain are that we love each other and God, and that A will be taking his degree for the next 5 to 6 years. England appears to be the best place in which to do that, providing the most options for us and requiring the least depletion of our resources. Whether we actually end up there or not still depends on a number of things which have yet to take place, but we are moving in that direction.
I think-- no, I know!-- that I needed to do emotional leave-taking of my children (both spiritual as in VG and physical as in my own) in any case. The inappropriate parts of my attachment were a mental and emotional block keeping me clinging on to a life situation that is no longer in place. Adult children are not like children living at home, a fact I have always championed and which English-speaking nations seem to support with their culture. But my biological children did grow up in a society which expects Mama to be always available down the road; if anything in life should go wrong, Mama will drop everything and step in.
Now, I am perfectly willing, nay eager, to step in when needed; I'm just not willing, nor do I think it's healthy, to wait in the wings until called for, to sacrifice my own life on that altar as I see countless Austrian mothers doing. What may therefore feel like abandonment to an Austrian adult child may actually be healthy detachment, moving on to a more equal stage of adult life in which it becomes possible to be both Mum and friend.
In any case, I'm slowly coming into a wider place where my past no longer fills my thoughts nor determines my actions, where creativity and delight in the simple things of life are returning, where I now actually sometimes choose to spend a whole afternoon listening to worship music or reading something theologically "heavy" (which I for awhile simply could not handle). I still find myself allergic to CAWKI, but not to fellowship. I still dislike hype, but love God-stuff. I'm still not a triumphalistic American revivalist, but I am a minister of the Good News.
And I'm still not finished.