iThink...thereFore, iAm

I heard that phrase a lot when i was younger.

<Warning: much heartfelt thoughts ahead. Read only if you really really really want to.>

As a kid (and I was one naughty kid) I got disciplined quite a bit. Note that I used the word “disciplined” and not “punished”, because it was abundantly clear that I had done something wrong and needed to be reminded otherwise. I may have been playful but I sure wasn’t stupid and my parents knew it.

Each time it happened, I would get a carefully measured discipline, matched to the crime, and I would be told that it hurt them to do this more than it hurt me. I didn’t understand this till quite a few years later when I was put in charge of taking care of my brother, which I honestly did very little about. Yet the few times I was instructed by my parents to be the party enacting disciplinarian for him, I understood what it meant for it the disciplining to hurt them more than it did me. Because I loved my brother it hurt me to do something I knew would make him upset. Because they loved me it hurt my parents to enact discipline they knew would make me suffer or shed tears.

Because He loves us it hurts Him to see us face hardship, though sometimes it is necessary for us.

It’s been many years since then and I’ve had to do the same thing yet again - something that I know will benefit another, yet it will cause pain to both. And like me as a child being disciplined the full intent and magnitude may not be known. The tears I shed are likely to not be seen or even understood by anyone, much less the other party (or parties).

Yet what I do, I know and through counsel have been told is for my good, for others’ good, is honorable and is upright. I am sorely tempted to take a convenient path, that at least I bear less sorrow, but again I am bound. Others have taken that convenient path to their own gains, digging deeper into wounds yet healed.

“Here now is your final lesson: do not commit the crime for which you now serve the sentence. God said, ‘Vengeance is mine.’”

“I don’t believe in God.”

“It doesn’t matter. He believes in you.”

I am forced to silence in my despair, my anger, bound in keeping the most basic code of integrity that others have betrayed, and tied to the pain that they bring. I am sorely tempted to do the same, yet what good would it do, when falsehoods about me are flying all around with no way for me to quell the misthoughts.

This is for you, that I do what I do. Should it have been for myself, I would have taken another path of action, one that may not have been so peaceful - but it would not have been kind. And so I endure for now, hoping that one day I will see light from the darkness of anguish i have been cast into, because the things that can possibly spread from this will not look favorably toward me.

I only hope one day you’ll understand.