Lent Day 31: Place

Last time when I thought about "Place" I thought about my physical place. This week, as I was thinking about "Place" I was struck by my mental place. What kind of place am I at mentally?

The emotional ups and downs of pregnancy, labor, delivery and postpartum time can create some interesting and quite varied mental places. I have been exhausted, overwhelmed, filled with joy...a whole spectrum of emotions. This week I have been in a much better place emotionally. I feel like I am starting to really connect with my daughter; we were okayed to go off the "low birth weight" feeding plan, meaning there is the chance to get a little more sleep at night; all this led to a better mental place with more joy.

I have a tendency to work myself into pity parties pretty easily (I had this ability before I went through the emotional upheaval of pregnancy) and I have found it is important to evaluate my mental place. My husband has been amazing at helping me with this. He doesn't let me withdraw into myself, but pulls me out into conversation to evaluate these pity parties and not let them happen. Now, I'm not saying that by simply evaluating our mental place we can be in a place of constant joy. There will always be those whose disposition tends towards a more joyful personality versus a melancholy or inwardly contemplative personality. There are going to be times of sadness, anger, questioning, etc. However, I do think that with God's help we can enter into a place of inward joy, or that deep, hard-to-explain emotion that is the deep-down-I-know-I-am-loved-and-cared-for even in the midst of hard times or depressing moods.

And because I am tired, I am now going to veer off on another thought that is unrelated, and I have no good segue to make my writing seem at all professional. I also would like to be in a mental place where I am aware of God's movement. I want to be in a place where I see others the way Jesus seems them so that my interactions might be more Christ-like.

And maybe that is what I really wanted to write in the first place about PLACE, but you get all of the other mental mumblings that got me to what I might really have been thinking in the first place (ah the joys of being a verbal processor and using a blog in the same way I might use a conversation!).