Perspective

 

It's all in how I look at it.  No, let me correct. It's all in the way I choose to look at the situation.  The light bulb shines through lessons learned from the "Mother May I" childhood game.  True, at the age of four, five, or six, I knew absolutely nothing about "Choice."  I grew up with Southern-born parents.  Translated for the uninitiated, "If I say do it, then do it! If I say, don't do it, you'd better not!"  A part of the southern culture you tested at her own peril. To be allowed to "backtalk," like asking "Why," must've been one reserved for more liberal parents.  Evidently, they were native Northerners or some other aberration.  None of them lived in my neighborhood, which took decades to evolve into a "community." I liked the neighborhood better.  Still do. 

All adults (even the marginal ones) received respect. The underlying threat to potentially disobedient or disrespectful kids hid a defining question:  "Do I need to call your mother?" Dads didn't enter the equation, since they could more easily be dissuaded (read "manipulated") by daughters who showed contrition and could conjure up tears on cue. I'm just saying.  A formidable list of "Thou shalt not" characterized my march from childhood into adulthood. 

Nor had I shed the decrees by the time I taught my first high school English class. I began simply and directly by firmly stating,  "If I say do it, do it; no backtalk tolerated!" I fully expected compliance.  What did those "Methods" classes (which I "Aced," by the way) have to do with the (my) real world!. Right? Wrong.  The students soon disabused me of that dated notion.  I had to become inventive just to keep and hold their attention in five-minute increments.  

No.  Labels of "slow" or "learning disabled" didn't fit them.  Actually, they were typical teenagers, products of their generation, who had been reared by a different breed of parents.  (Their parents truly must've been original Northerners! Even more challenging for me, my students represented varied cultures and ethnicities.  Unknowingly and unprepared, I'd encountered diversity in its many iterations.  Self-searching led to revelations: Mine had been a life of "either-or," of forced choices. Shamelessly, I'd embraced a smugness that derives from sameness.  Hmm.

Those days of reckoning propelled me to a place that'd always been my cocoon.  The Chicago Public Library System.  I could check out an enormous number of books; the System even gave grace time to read and digest them.  Stumbling upon Boundaries, authored by Drs. HenryCloud and John Townsend, led me to myriad library stacks, even to the Holy Bible! I studied what the Bible taught about obedience and disobedience; Spirit and flesh; and choices and consequences. Nor did I stop reading, searching, and seeking once the Bible found me! I still do.

The Book of Proverbs, however,  represents Light that directs me through life's tunnels that can confuse and discombobulate.  For too many years to count,  I've read a chapter of Proverbs, daily, monthly, and year to year.  If wisdom is what you seek, she's found on every page of Proverbs. And she's consistent; her words never change!

No longer would I take the weasel's way out.  (The poor creatures already carry the burden of so many human foibles).  Nevertheless,  to consciously and honestly choose may require painful examination,  time, and introspection.  I had to give up convenient escape hatches.  I had to embrace the art of asking questions, not of others, but first of the Holy Spirit, and then myself.  My quest produced questions that proliferate like weeds in life's garden; some are harder to pull up than others. But that's life in the big city! I just pull on my big girl's undergarment and...

"I know I've been changed.  I know I've been changed.
I know I've been changed.  The angels in heaven have changed my name.
The angels in heaven have changed my name,
I heard a cry, "I  have been redeemed," The angels in heaven have changed my name.
The angels in heaven have changed my name,
To know that I have been born again/
The angels in heaven have signed
my name."