1st December 2016
My birthday, my engagement, two weeks off – life has been pretty good lately! And yet this has been the first week in a very long time where I’ve found life hard…
I guess when you come off the back of two incredible weeks and you’re on a total high after spending 12 days with a man who has slowly but surely become a very big part of your life, and for that matter – a very big part of me… It’s pretty hard to go back to routine and reality.
Dropping my fiancé off at the airport was emotional and knowing he’s out to sea for the next month with little communication on top of the 4000 mile distance we already face, I felt slightly unsteady on my feet as the readjustment to routine seemed harder than ever before.
I never knew missing someone could make you feel sick in the stomach. I never knew loneliness could hurt quite so much. I never knew someone could become such a part of you that when he’s not there, an empty void really does take its place.
Driving back to Stoke – a town still very new and unfamiliar – I felt a heaviness weighing me down and despite my best efforts at trying to make myself happy and look for the positives, for once it didn’t soothe the ache.
10 calls to different friends, and multiple whatsapps, snapchats and txts later – the weight seemed content to remain where it was and a new emotional heartache seemed to snuggle round it like a blanket.
It was at this moment that I stopped and thought to myself – “why do I always have to keep up tradition of going to the answer as my final and last resort?” Asking two hundred questions to get there and yet knowing the right way all along.
And so I got in the car, as I regularly do, and just drove and prayed. Driving keeps me focussed. Praying gives me peace.
Don’t ask me how it works – I don’t know. But what I do know is that the answer is never wrapped around the gift I’ve put at the top of my list…
I’m driving as it starts to get dark and I turn on the news. And this is where I know it’s not coincidence – because I work in news and listen to, watch and read hundreds of articles a week. But within 30 seconds my perspective on life had changed, my mood was reset, my energy levels re-balanced and I got a firm grip on the heaviness that had been trying to take me down.
I’m reminded of the world I live in. I’m prompted about the life I lead. Awareness punches me in the face and I turn to embarrassment as suddenly and very quickly my issues and my sorrows seem to fade away in comparison to the suffering of the millions who live closer to me than my own fiancé does.
ISIS film a CHILD carrying out a beheading for the first time, as the terror group increasingly use boys to kill. Boys as young as 6 are being taught how to execute gruesome murders and carry out brutal beheadings with just a small knife. The boys face is uncovered – revealing a chilling dead-eyed stare that offers a glimpse of the evil he has witnessed carried out by ISIS’ killers.
Horrifying images show emaciated skeleton children caught up in the battles to defeat ISIS in Mosul. As the desperate battle to rid the world of ISIS continues, these are the innocent children caught in the middle.
A place which just a month ago was simply a desert, is now home to 50,000 displaced people forced out of their homes, living in tents, starved and close to death.
Woman continue to suffer brutal rape by armed groups and are then ostracised and rejected by their own families and communities because of it. Left alone with nowhere to go many do not survive or are picked up by other men and forced into the trafficking sex trade.
71 people are dead after a Columbian plane ran out of fuel. The plane plunged into a mountainside leaving only six of the 77 people aboard alive. An entire Brazilian football team, on their way to a cup final, were on the plane. Only two of them are alive but in critical condition. Friends and family are left in utter devastation, lives ripped apart, questions which may never be answered.
For a while I find it hard to move. I find it hard to breathe. We can almost become immune to stories in the news, the headlines, bulletins which flash up and within seconds are gone again. Pushed in between promotional adverts on the cheapest toys and sofa’s we can buy this Christmas. But these are real people. These are real lives. These are stories which are ongoing, happened this week and continue to happen today.
You see when I say my mood was reset and my energy levels re-balanced, I don’t mean I stepped out of that moment singing and dancing because actually my life is so good. It means I was pushed to a new level to get out of my small minded double framed square box and live on purpose in a way where I will make the biggest difference in this world I am capable of making. It means I chose in that moment to take the blurry focus of myself and instead sharpen it to the world around me. It means yes I can experience low moments, and loneliness, have harder days and not always feel on top of the world, BUT within reason. Keeping my filter open, having a 24/7 awareness that my life is a GIFT wrapped in silver wrapping compared to many of the lives right outside my door and right across from our country.
For years I lived as a victim. For years I could see nothing else but my pain. And I know how far I’ve come but this last week I had a moment where I could feel the self-pity creep back in again. And the second I stopped and focussed my attention to God and prayed for an answer, I didn’t get the answer I wanted or had asked for – but I got a glimpse of the world I live in and the lives around me. Their suffering and utter hopelessness and desperation. I instead had the slits in my eyes which had gradually started falling asleep again pulled apart and I knew in that moment that this was a loud and clear message to wake up from my slumber once again and live on purpose.
To all the beautiful people around me, my friends, my family and to the many I haven’t yet had the pleasure of meeting. I know so many of you struggle. I know so many of you read my blogs because you’re desperately trying to find a way out of your pain. And I hear you and I feel you and I know where you’re at. But I encourage you in this moment to look around. To read and to watch and to listen to some of the stuff that is going on right now. We live in a desperate and at times a scarily evil world. But every day people are making life transforming changes for others. And if there is nothing you can do right now – then that’s ok – but just by taking our eyes off ourselves and looking outwards, it changes the way we feel inside. It makes our issues look smaller and less scary, it makes life more do-able and it might even stir up a passion inside of you, a fight, a decision, to step out of your pain and into someone else’s instead.
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