OUR NATURE IS LOVE
Ani Benedetto
God’s faithfulness doesn’t always look how we think it should.
When you don’t know where you’re going to end up in five months, there are two sudden losses in the family and some of the most important relationships in your life start rapidly imploding, it doesn’t really look like God is faithful. Confusion, grief, loss, and goodness are not words that I would put in the same category. The last stretch of my senior year was one of the most difficult periods of my life… not quite what I had in mind for the conclusion of my high school career before I’d be leaving home.
Although a series of challenges presented themselves this past spring, I think I was so preoccupied with keeping my head above water that I didn’t take much time to actually process the huge events that were happening around me; I didn’t know how. So when summer rolled around and there was finally time to stop, breathe, and reflect, that’s when feelings about all the things that had happened in the spring came up, and they didn’t present themselves in a way I expected.
I have never been one to get angry. I get frustrated, but I’m the kind of person who laughs when they’re mad. This was not like that. When the dust settled and I saw the past for what it was, or what I thought it was, I was angry. I was resentful, even bitter. Outwardly, I think I seemed to be fine and happy enough, but there was a tightness in my chest and a bitterness in my mind that I couldn’t deny. And it just wouldn’t leave.
Not only would it not leave, it spread into various aspects of my life. I was so angry about what I had gone through and the pain that my loved ones experienced that I started hyper-fixating on other things to be mad about. It was like Pandora’s box had been opened- now that I had one thing to be angry about, I was raging over all these past hurts that I didn’t realize had wounded me so deeply. But instead of putting it down, I wore the bitterness like a cloak and just let myself soak in it. Since God had abandoned me at this time and let me hurt by myself, then that’s exactly what I’d do. I was unwilling to give him the chance to help me.
But allow me to let you in on a little secret- being mad all the time takes up a lot of energy. I honestly think I just got so exhausted that I said, “Fine, let’s give communication a shot,” and just started talking to God- something I hadn’t done in a long while. It wasn’t easy. All my walls were up and I was super hesitant. I felt like a little kid in that I didn’t know what to say or how to say it. So I picked something I was bitter about and just started writing. I wrote about what made me mad and why it made me mad. I’d do this for stretches at a time and had to take a lot of breaks because like I said, it was tiring! But by being brutally honest, by being almost moody in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament with the things I wrote in my journal, pieces of the stone around my heart began to chip away. Not only that, but while I was writing, the Lord gently showed me blessings that had come from the situations or people who had hurt me. In taking the time to relieve the weight of my anger, I was able to count the joys.
This has been a process and a learning curve. Healing is not linear by any means. I kind of feel like that one Paramore song: “I’m not angry anymore, except when I am”. Something that was a huge step for me was going to Confession and expressing my anger to the priest. I want to share with you now something that the priest I spoke to one Sunday morning in July:
Anger is not part of our nature; our nature is love.
As corny as it sounds, love is always the remedy. Acknowledging first that you are loved and then by treating yourself as someone who is royally loved makes such a difference. I’ve been at college three weeks now and it’s been a learning curve. Living in a different state than my family and the people I am most familiar with has felt alien sometimes. But when I walk to class, there are blessings all around me. In the challenges, there are opportunities for growth. And when I get angry, there is an opening for love to heal more than I could have imagined it to heal.
That you are continually holding me, sustaining me, and loving me… Jesus I trust in You.
