...what if I just need a place to let some words spill out? What if they spill out in bouquets of bright colors and pleasing scents but their frames are made of snakes and lies? Will you the reader be able to tell? Will it matter? When words smell like lilacs and honeysuckle do you care what lies beneath them? Perfumed syllables cover the stench of hope's decay. A violet or two will fool most surface dwellers, allowing them to pass by quickly and unaware. Is that what words are supposed to do? What if my aesthetics with words are similar to Morticia Addams' with flowers? What happens when luscious blooms are discarded? When the ragged silhouette of thorns is all that remains will you still see the beauty? Perhaps we'll find out.
My past is my kryptonite. This journey forward has been bogged down by the muck and mire of my beginnings. I may not have started the mess, but I deepened the ruts. I hitched my wagon and followed the path of least resistance. I brought it with me. I have tracked the filth into each relationship. I sullied the potential, smudged all of the possibilities and then cast aside probabilities as tarnished. Me. I did that. I said I believed I was a new creation and then feared the same old stuff in the same old way that the old me feared. I react to the new with the poison of the old. Fear. Fear is the venom inside me killing my hope. Forgetting what lies behind.... only when I am not frightened. Claiming my identity in Christ... and then reciting the mantras of my past making my history my god. As a believer, I am more than the sum of my past. I am the recipient of a future hope. No ruts, no filth, no mire. The Gospel trumps everything. My past is my kryptonite. What'