I genuinely don't understand how humanity works. I feel like it's possible that I am the only one in the universe who somehow ended up off of the gravy train that everyone else follows, but I just don't get it.
I don't get how we can have relationships with people we don't continually invest in, and how we can put things on the back-burner for extended amounts of time and then go back to them and find that everything hasn't burned to a crisp.
We cannot juggle everything - that's impossible. I get that. But that's also why we can only put so much on our plates at a given time. That's why sometimes you have to let things go and move on. But how then, can we say that we want to keep hold of something that we don't invest in, maintain, and put ourselves and our time into?
I get that this is a huge concept, but I just don't get it. If you eave a pot on the stove and forget about it, it burns. If you don't take care of a garden, everything dies, weeds take over, and everything's a dirty, ugly, disgusting mess. If you plant seeds in soil that can't grow anything...well that pretty much answers its own result.
Yet we do this all of the time with people in our lives.
We treat them like the decorations we only pull out at Christmas, or that gift that your mom sets on the mantle when her mother-in-law visits so she doesn't get offended. We box them up and take them out when it's either convenient or we're forced to for various reasons. We rationalize it by saying it's how life works, and that we're really busy, and that we can't put all of our time where we aren't...
But then where are our roots?
We invest time in our families even though we aren't with them, because we love them and care about them. But are they the only people worth our time when we aren't with them? Are our significant others and our families the only people we can continually invest in? Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe I'm just plain crazy, but I feel like those aren't the only people who have helped us get where we are. I feel like those aren't the only people we love and hold dear. I feel like those aren't the only people who have contributed to us being able to stand right now. And yet we just treat them like they don't really matter, and can only count when we have time, or when things are easy.
Newsflash: things are never easy. That's why things take effort.
Graduating high school - takes effort.
Graduating university - takes effort.
Getting a job...and keeping it - takes effort.
Maintaining relationships - takes effort.
Everything takes effort.
If we wait for things to become easy or convenient to concern ourselves with them, then we will be waiting forever...which often is exactly what happens. Often times, we move on in the process and then there's usually some kind of explanation about how things just didn't work out...but how many people have we hurt by just simply not caring enough to put in the effort? Does that even matter to most people?
Maybe I'm the village idiot in this crazy world, but I feel like people aren't like the Christmas lights that we only look at maybe once a year. They aren't like the random junk we put in boxes and hang on to because maybe one day we might need them again. And when we treat them like they are, we end up hurting them more than we could ever know. And, to put a selfish spin on it, we also end up hurting ourselves.
I could go on about this for quite a while, but by now you've probably had enough of my chatter. I know it sounds like I'm ranting and raving - and maybe on some level I am - but I am genuinely curious as to how everyone else sees humanity and relationships. I am genuinely curious as to what the answer is, and why we treat people the way we do...why we expect everything to be okay with people when we ignore them, put them in boxes, and come back to them when it's easy and convenient. And then how do we say it isn't easy? It is - we're taking the easy way out. If we're going to do it, we better at least be big enough to admit it. But we aren't. We rationalize everything and then continue on with our lives.
Well then what about care for others? What about the lessons we've learned from God and the teachings we read in the Bible? If we can't at least trying to live out what we're being taught without rationalizing our way out of our faults and excusing them, then where is the application of trying to live our lives like Christ? Where is the application of everything we've been taught? Does that only happen when it's easy and convenient, too?
I don't know...maybe I'm nuts. It's just a bunch of ramblings, but I guess I just had to get it out.
God Bless all,
EE
