Checking in

From an email to a friend tonight: I feel like I'm down a well and the lid is being slowly pulled across the opening... no... air! Ugh. I can't think of a good metaphor. But being in a deep dark hole sounds about right. I've got to just snap OUT of it. It's hit me so hard with all this off time (too much time to think and wonder and wish and long and mourn) that THIS is my life, and I'm really disappointed by it. My 15-day trip to CO and FL was so so great, and it was so unexpectedly good to be around people all the time, kids 24/7 - granted, these were people and kids I love - :) But since I came home, oh, I've just spiraled. I feel a lot of shame at where I am. That I haven't married and had kids by my age, and I feel like people must think I'm such a loser. Why should I care what people think, right? And of course people don't think anything about me near as much as I think they do. :) So anyway - feeling the absence of love in my life - romantic love - that's a major hit to my heart. And then it becomes this spiral of thinking "what's wrong with me?" or "Why NOT me?" and usually concluding that it's some sort of judgment from God, that I'm deficient on some scale I don't know about. (end of email quote)

So just putting something up to say I'm still here, thinking too much. But I've listened to some good sermons online in the last couple of days that have given me some (other) things to think about. I'm not going to write about them yet, but it's caused me to feel a weird mix of guilt for feeling the way I do, anger at some of the points that I don't agree with, and comfort that I'm not the only person who struggles with God on these issues.