I am linking up for the Five Minute Friday. The FMF is hosted by Kate Motaung on her blog Heading Home. Today’s prompt is “Hide.” Write for five minutes; unedited.
When I was a teenager, my sister and I babysat for some of our favorite little girls. Their mom and her sister used to babysit for us and then we started babysitting for her kids when she had kids. I remember McKenzie coming to my dad’s house and often wanting to hide behind my sister and I. We couldn’t figure out why she was afraid to go downstairs in our basement. One day it dawned on us that she was afraid of the deer head that our dad had mounted on the wall.
Isn’t it crazy how we want to hide when things are unfamiliar to us? Or how we hide because we don’t want to show that side of ourselves to those around us? As a little girl, I often would shed many tears because of the words that were slung at me; the names that I was called. But the tears always came! I couldn’t hide them from the people that were slinging names at me. In a way, I felt that they were winning because I couldn’t hide those words.
But one of the biggest things that I hid from others was our family’s journey with a mental illness. It took me a very very long time before I brought our story out of hiding. But once I began sharing our story, many other stories came out of hiding too. There is so much power in those two words “me too!” Stories are meant to be shared. They are not meant to be hidden. They reveal a big part of who we are; of who God calls us to be.
*Yet there are still times when it is hard for me to share my story. There are still tears that I want to hide. There are the tears that silently fall from my eyes when I am not sure that God has heard the desires of my heart. There are the tears that I secretly shed when I come home to an empty house and bed. There are the tears that I want to hide because I don’t want the world to see how vulnerable I am. Yet there is something so holy about no longer hiding our tears. There is something healing when we show our tears to each other.
*That is where my five minutes stopped but I had to finish out my thought.