The Club

The longer I am a woman, the more I realize that we are all very much the same.

No matter what our ethnicity, our age, our social status, marital status or our hair color, we are a part of a unique club of chromosome sharing humans. Though we are each on individual journeys, we all share many of the same desires, the same disappointments, and the same dreams. All of us, in the club.

We all want to be liked and we all need to feel needed.

We all juggle life’s responsibilities and long to make a difference.

We all wish we could change things about our life and wonder if we are to blame.

We all struggle to get real…struggle to be honest…struggle to walk in truth.

We all want more than we have, have more than we deserve, and wish we knew in the deepest places of our heart that it was enough.

And somewhere, dwelling inside all of us, is that little girl who longs to be noticed and screams inside to be heard and wants to feel significant.

We aren’t even that good at hiding it.

When our girlfriends choose to go to lunch without us, we go back to being that little girl who didn’t get chosen for kickball or the cheerleading squad. Hurt.

When we watch our child walking away from truth instead of walking in it, we think about the compromises we made along the way and how they changed our life in ways we didn’t want them to. Regret.

When someone we love tells us they don’t love us anymore, we silently wonder if anyone ever really did or anyone ever really will. Rejection.

Even though we know better. We still think these things.

In our defense, we didn’t gain entrance into this club without some emotional coaching along the way. The truth is, these feelings have been with us for quite awhile.

We learned early on that it is important to be strong and hold it together. That’s what our momma did and that’s just what members of the club do.

We realized right from the start that what we looked like would matter more to people than it should and we might as well do something about that. The club does discriminate against it’s own, and we know it all too well.

We sensed that guilt would be apart of our daily life and so would fear. Those are two things we knew club members would have in common, if nothing else. So we practiced them, continually.

And although the club’s membership is full of women of all different shapes and sizes, there are many common emotional threads that bind us. We may wear the look of an athletic woman. Or the soccer mom who just burnt the dinner. Or the executive in red stilettos with Wall Street on her mind. Or the retired woman who paces herself for the first time in her life. Or the girl next door who likes to curl up with a good book and a hot cup of coffee, especially when it’s raining. Or the artsy eclectic who likes to express herself in ways most people don’t understand and really just likes to be left alone.

But inside, we are all a part of the club. We all know that shopping is a great way to medicate ourselves when we feel really bad about something, and food never talks back or loves us any less. We all know that we will never accomplish enough to make ourselves feel accomplished, but we still have to try. We all know that chick flicks don’t tell us about real life, but we secretly wish they did.

But there are some other things we DON’T fully know that we need to.

We need to know in the deepest places of our heart that we are completely accepted and loved completely by God. That we aren’t perfect, but we don’t have to be because being flawed is part of what makes forgiveness possible. That who we are has nothing to do with the labels people attach to us, even when those labels feel good. That we don’t have to hold it all together and in fact, we are not supposed to.

That being a part of the club doesn’t automatically mean that we will always do things the way we’ve done them or think the way we have thought or function the way we have functioned.

But rather, it is, being a part of a group of chromosome sharing humans who are meant to walk this life together with fingers entwined and hearts knitted who aren’t afraid to admit they sometimes feel like that little girl who didn’t get chosen for kickball.

Because, well...we club members just understand.

P.S. For those of you who are going to be participating in Lelia’s online study of Behind Those Eyes starting tomorrow, I am so excited to share this journey with you! I will be blogging every Tuesday about each of the chapters, and I hope you will come back and visit me to read more about my thoughts on each one and maybe get some insight into what God put on my heart to write about. And...if you want to participate, there is still time for you! Even if you aren’t, I hope you will visit anyway, as I think you will find something here that you can relate to during these 10 weeks. I will likely be blogging more than once a week during that time, so check back often!