Nana Holds: The First Lesson

Coffee Hour @ Chicklit Power...

Thank you for taking a coffee break in your day and joining me for more of Nana Holds. I think we left off with my first lesson, the first big drop and dip in the ride of this life since John’s homecoming. Grab your coffee and come on in.

While life was picking up speed for me, meaning the framework was being established and formed for the ministry of CPM which required much of my time, there were warning bells that were clanging for boundaries to be set in our home so we all could enjoy living together, except John was “living” less and less with us and more and more with Jenel and her family. They were becoming inseparable and moving toward their future. This journal entry explains it in the moment:

“I started feeling very anxious yesterday. I guess that’s because I thought it would be different. Why am I so bothered and why do I think it’s inconsiderate for him not to call and say he’s not coming home?”

It was like I was having this conversation with myself because in the sentence following that entry, I say: “But it’s not him being discourteous, rather an ignorance of not knowing how to show courtesy, and I am guilty of ignorance in other areas of my life. Search my heart, oh, God, and see if there be anything in there displeasing to you. Thank you for helping me to be honest, for revealing this. I confess, Lord, I wanted a chance to have a real relationship with him, for our ‘blended’ family to truly blend before he began a new family of his own.”

I expressed my frustration, which was really a need, to George, but his inability became that wall, once again, that would have to be taken down, bit by bit, and at his pace, not my own.
In the meantime, I was on one side of the wall wrestling with my need to explain myself and my “loud” attitude, which was greater than my ability to be quiet, to not make things bigger than they actually were which meant I couldn’t be driven around by my emotions.

He was on his side of the wall learning how to speak up to his son and voice his needs driven by his concerns that he was not quite able to share with me . . . yet.

While a portion of the responsibilities pertaining to little Johnny were taken over by John and Jenel, his home was still with us and that was for several reasons, all of them for the well-being of Johnny, with the intent to provide him stability that would go a long way in his development and relationships to come.

But John and Jenel were eager to “be a family,” to practice that before marriage and they began to resist and insist in ways that became extremely uncomfortable. I understood but wrestled with their inability to grasp the truth that comes from experiencing the lessons in life, so a sort of silent tug-of-war began.

Join me next week for more of the end of the season of Nana Holds!

Learning the lessons,
Evinda

Nana holds . . . in her heart