The Last Word

A while back I posted about my fear of being photographed. A stupid fear, as fears go, but very real nonetheless. I’m not sure where the origins of this come from, and why I get a knot in my stomach every time I need to get out and promote myself, but all I know is it must be yet another thing God feels I need to get over!

And, well, He’s always right.

So I’m trying. More than “getting over” my fear I’m trying to put it in perspective. The whole reason I write is due to His grace. He gave me a gift for it and it has become a safe haven for me as well as a way to help others who might be struggling with the same thing. I want my writing to be about God and not me. I want to tell my story in a way that shows all He’s done for me so others can gain insight and a way out of the darkness of verbal abuse or alcoholism… or whatever it is they are struggling with.

So I saw the picture and post in this month’s M Magazine about me called “Poetric Justice.” It went along with another article on balance, and the healthy ways people keep themselves in good physical and mental condition. The picture, as I had feared, made me look like a deranged freak. I am frowning, and concentrating on my notebook so hard I look as if I will burn a hole into it. (Not to mention that the angle is most unflattering – taken from below and to the side where the only thing you can see is chin…. upon chin…. You know what I’m talking about ladies.)

I read the sidebar and as I feared, the post doesn’t seem to convey at all what I was trying to say. I wanted people to understand that the turmoil of my life in dealing with my dad was years ago. In the past. Done. Kaput.

And yet the article makes it sound as if I first decided last January to forgive and get on with my life. (January was when the book came out.) One of my “quotes” is:

“It’s kind of Christian.”

It’s not KIND OF Christian. It is Christian. The small, sound byte snippets they’d used condensed what I’d said down to the point that the real meaning got lost. I wanted to convey that all those years in struggle were in the past. That the bad situations I put myself into were in the past.

I was annoyed until I got to the last sentence:

“When you look at yourself as a child of God, you look at your place in the world differently.”

And suddenly I GOT IT. It didn’t matter that I looked like a goof in the picture, or that they’d quoted me wrong so I sounded disturbed. What MATTERED was the final word was about God. And to that I say: Amen.