You Have Been In This Place Long Enough

 

You have been in this place long enough.

That is the title. A title that came from a scripture in the Old Testament. At one point, after wandering for 40 years, the Children of Israel were tired. Tired of the walking, tired of the homelessness, tired of the mana, and just tired of not having a place to permanently put down roots. And then God comes to them and says, "ye have compassed this mountain long enough." Because God saw how tired they were, and how they ached for permeance, and knew it was time to move forward and stop circling.  How do I know He knew this? Because as a parent I watched my son struggle, and I knew just as God must have known, when the time for circling the mountain had ended, and the time to get on with the journey had come.

My son, who was six at the time, broke his femur while playing tackle football at recess. What followed was a major surgery, screws and plates being inserted into his leg, a month and a half of being in a wheelchair, and months of physical therapy. Even now his gait when he walks still shows signs of his injury.

     It remains one of the most painful things that I had to watch as a mother, and the event holds enough trauma for my son, that it took over five months before he would even consider talking about what happened and processing his feelings surrounding the event with a therapist.

While he had made leaps and bounds in relearning how to walk and run again, riding his bike continued to allude him. He had no desire to get on his pedal bike and ride. He would ask for training wheels (which is something he has never had on any bike he has ever ridden). He would say that he just didn’t like riding bikes anymore. He would say that he was good at riding bikes last summer, but this summer he was more interested in getting good at doing other activities. And on it went.

One day I suggested trying out his bike and all I got was a fight. Finally, after answering all his concerns, and discussing his hang ups with trying, I promised him something I knew he couldn’t resist. If he would try riding his bike, he would get a YouTube day.

He agreed. But he tried his best to control his environment. He would only try it on a sidewalk in a cul-de-sac and only on the parts where there was grass on either side of the sidewalk. Then I had to hold on to his bike while he started going. Here was a kid who has been riding a bike since he was three, never having training wheels, who rode the same exact bike he now sat on all last summer without a problem, telling me not to let go. Conditions were the same, but he himself had changed, which meant in his mind… everything had changed.

So, there I stood. Holding onto the back seat of my son’s Spider-Man bike while so he could start. And he would act like we were going to start, and then put his foot down. I would assure him I got him, but then he would get nervous. After a few false-starts, he would get going. I would say things like “pedal, pedal pedal!” to encourage him, but the minute he started to wobble, he would steer onto the grass and stop.

 It didn't matter that he had done this bike riding thing before, and it definitely did not matter that my son had been riding a two-wheel bike since he was little. He was different now then he was before the accident. He had now come to understand that hard, difficult, and painful things can happen to you, and that thing, what ever it is, will forever change how you approach everything and anything you do -even if it's something you were a "pro" at. 

So it is with divorce. No matter what I walk through, even if it is something I have experienced and done before, my journey will forever be colored by my divorce experience. And while there are plenty of things that I am "pro" at, they seem harder somehow now that I have waded through that hard thing. And, just like the Children of Israel, it feels as if all I know is how to circle and wander and eat mana, because I don't know what promises God even has on reserve for me in my own "promised land."

But then God comes to me, just as I came to my son, and says, it is time to move forward. It is time to get back on that bike...whether metaphorically or literally, and it is time to pedal. God then goes on to whisper, as he did to the Children of Israel and say, "I know your tired, and I know your worried that you will fall, and it will hurt, that you will never get there, but get back on the bicycle, you have been in this place long enough."

That is essentially what I had to tell my son during those moments he would hit the brakes and stop.

God sees you aching for permeance, and he sees your wandering through the wilderness, and he wants it to end too. I don't know how long you will have to circle your own mountain, but sometimes being asked to move forward in your journey is the harder ask, because some trauma has changed you. And if that is the case, as it often is, no that you have someone shouting at your back to "pedal, pedal, pedal!"

Love

Madeline