OK, I can't blame the car on sleeping. Sick, but awake...
What these occasions all shared were the simple fact, that I was sick and tired and in a " zone".
I always have had the habit, since early childhood, of jumping out of bed and running thru the house and down the stairs, without light, without thought and without memory.
Many nights in the cobwebbed past would find my oldest brother running down the back staircase and my other brother following me down the front one, both trying to stop me before I left the house...
I would be screaming, trapped in a nightmare that my mind and body respondeded, not by what it saw or heard externally, but what was transpiring inside my little noggin...
To my body, the dream was real and true events were imaginary.
My neurologist called them " night terrors"...
I spent years terrified, waking up in the morning with bruises and scrapes I didn't go to sleep with, slinking down the stairs and seeing one brother or the other with welts and scratches, looking up from the kitchen table, angry and tired.
The dreams weren't real but the situations they created were.
Kind of makes you wonder what " real" is....
I spent entirely to many years of my life being a mixologist of both legal and illegal chemical compounds, and have had what some would call " hallucinations".
I remember one night, walking back from a bar about a mile and a half from my house.
It was cold and clear. -10 below zero cold and the mixology that night, included some extremely special mushrooms. The trees were bare and the remaining branches were glazed in ice. My peripheral vision picked them up, following me, these silent , tiny and incredibly evil tree people, jumping tree to tree, branch to branch, just beyond the limits of my peripheral vision.
I entered my house, insane smile frozen to my face, climbed the stairs, turned off the lights and crawled under my bedcovers, still seeing the ice sparkled eyes of the tree people, terrorizing me...
...even without lights on.
They sure seemed real. On cold, clear nights I still look twice over my shoulder, wondering if their still there.
So what makes something " real"?
Emotion?
Reason?
Sanity?
Of course, tree people don't exist. Especially in the daytime and if you have never experienced their hallucinated presence... But if you have experienced them in their irrationality and impossibility, you may find yourself gently questioning their invalidity, as the cold wind blows across the hairs of your neck, alone, at night...
What Pavlov has proven to me can seem irrefutable while at the same time being impossible.
My brain sure does the freak thing, late at night...
Those who know Faith understand that it's presence is Infinitaly greater than any taught knowledge. You don't always know when you have it. And sometimes there is a lag between the having and the knowing and the feeling...
But it is real...
When you see someone with real Faith, you know it.
Even if you don't have it yourself, it is obvious, when seen in someone else..
But you do see something, and it reaches inside you, just a little bit.
It quietly, silently asks a question...
It asks you to believe with them...
It asks you to choose what is " real"...
A funny thing happened recently...
One of the biggest questions alcoholics have as they enter recovery is exactly when they became a drunk. It is usually an impossible question and many get so lost in it, they end up relapsing instead of dealing with their disease. It is a common enough occurrence that A.A. has a saying. " Once you become a pickle, you will never be a cucumber again. The when it happened doesn't matter"..
I never knew when my drinking changed to desperate and destructive. I had a general idea, plus or minus a few years...
But I never knew exactly when...
A friend, a couple of months ago, wondered why I saw myself as such a bad egg, back then.
She never saw that in me. I've had a few different people express that sentiment, in the past twenty years or so...
It all clicked into place a few weeks ago....
I remember exactly when I began hating and despising myself, over stupid choices that led me to believe I was something evil and unforgivable...
I just didn't know it, at the time...
It was a lie, perpetrated in my own brain.
All created in my own head.
That never happened...
So, was that real?!?
I have had many conversations with my God recently.
Mostly, wondering how he could let me walk for the majority of my life, caught in a trap of my own setting, grateful that He eventually freed me, but resentful He left me in it for so long...
My whole spectrum of emotions have been in a swirling flux, between an overwhelming feeling of grace, from the freedom, to a deep and simmering struggle to understand, bouncing between anger and sadness and loss...
Never once before had I ever been upset or confused about the road I chose. I always understood the purpose of it, and my need for following it. I never questioned fairness or Grace withheld.
But ashamedly, I have, lately...
I know that doesn't go well with the Christian identity, but I have moments of questions, questions of what if, questions of who I would have become... Perhaps a much better Christian, without those experiences I dove head first into, in desperation...
This is true insanity. I have been Graced with the best of the best...
The best and most Wonderful Wife. The best three McMonkeys ever to swing in a tree.
The best Church and best friends and best circumstance anyone could ever hope for...
But somehow, in all the gifts, I still find ghosts of loss.
So I pray a lot. I try to run the " philosophical" bend rather than the questioning ones...
God chose to let me take all the roads I traveled for His perfect reasons. I always believed they were necessary, but recently I think He could have cut me a little bit of slack, back then...
How ungrateful I am.
How terribly human...
So I wasn't guilty of the things I thought I was, but that doesn't matter when God has plans for you...
I'm not doubting the plans or there implementations. I am not even doubting the results.
I am just sad for loss. Lost time and lost opportunities....
Deep down, I know all the whys for the roads. I know why He had me take them.
I know He was correct in all He chose. In my soul, I doubt none of it...
But in a tiny corner of my heart, I am haunted by " what ifs"..
And a few " What could have beens"...
So Jesus is working on me, taking His time to make me right, in my heart.
Just like every other moment of every single journey, every single road past...
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