Читать книгу Ties That Bind - Marie Bostwick - Страница 7

Margot Matthews

“People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in, their true beauty is revealed only if there is a light from within.”

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross said that, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately. Maybe that surprises you. Most of the people I know, apart from my close friends, would be surprised to know I can quote from Kübler-Ross, and for one simple reason: I am nice.

I am. That’s how people describe me, as a nice person, a nice girl. That wasn’t so bad when I was a girl, but when you move beyond girlhood into womanhood, people tend to confuse niceness with lack of intellectual depth. And if that nice person is also a person of faith, they think you’re as shallow as a shower, incapable of introspection or academic curiosity. But mine is an examined faith, composed of inquisitiveness, discovery, and introspection. However, it didn’t begin with me.

I have known and loved God for as long as I can remember. It was as natural to me as breathing. As I’ve grown older and met so many people who struggle with the meaning and means of finding God, I have sometimes wondered about the validity of my faith. Could something so precious truly come as a gift?

I can’t answer for anyone else and don’t presume to, but, for myself, over and over again, the answer has been yes. I don’t understand why the searching and finding should be so simple for some and so arduous for others. I only know that I have been blessed beyond measure or reason. But while peace with God came easily to me, peace with myself has been elusive.

From adolescence onward and with increasing anxiety as the minutes and years of my biological clock ticked on, I waited for the missing piece of myself to arrive, the better half who would make me whole: a husband. And with him, children, a family. That’s what I’d always wanted, and that, I was sure, was what would make me happy. But after reading and meditating on Kübler-Ross, Brother Lawrence, the apostle Paul (“I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation”), I finally realized that I was not happy with myself because I had never learned to be happy by myself.

And so, more than a year ago, I broke it off with my boyfriend, Arnie Kinsella. It was hard, but it was for the best. I like Arnie, but I wasn’t in love with him any more than he was in love with me. Even so, if he’d asked me to marry him, I’d have said yes in a heartbeat. I know how terrible that sounds, but it’s the truth.

My friends—Evelyn, Abigail, Ivy, Virginia, everybody from my Friday night quilt circle—applauded my decision. They said I deserved the real thing—head-over-heels, candy-and-flowers, heart-throbbing, heart-stopping L-O-V-E.

A nice thought, but it’s never going to happen, not to me. And if finally acknowledging that didn’t quite make my windows blaze with light, at least it saved me from further humiliation and the weight of impossible dreams. I was over all that and I was over Arnie Kinsella.

Or so I thought. Until today.