Mulled Cider - Or Is It?

Oh dear.  It's one of those times again, isn't it?

You know, the times where you finish looking at someone else's photos, or reading some else's story, and you despair that your own life is woefully and inadequately interesting.  Or, what happens more often in my case, you envy their happiness, because you never had a chance to be part of it.  Somewhere along the line, I got the idea that if I could be part of someone's life, they were supposed to make it so I could be there with them.

Yes, I'm a bad person.  I know that a thousand times over.  Like most human beings, I am very selfish, self-seeking, and ignorant.  The curse of the race, right?  Only, it's not quite in the same fashion.  You see, I enjoy seeing the happiness of others.  I get joy from looking at the beauty and color and liveliness and friendship that others get to experience.  I love it.

I love it a little too much, as it turns out.

You see, I enjoy it for the first half, then the regrets that plague my mind set in.  I regret that I wasn't there to share in the happiness someone else took part in.  I regret my life, because I've never been a conventional person; I was never one of the kids with a bunch of friends, or even the kid with a couple of best friends.  I didn't have that kinship to share in.  I had no bosom friend, if you want to think in terms of Anne of Green Gables.  I don't have the pictures, the stories, the memories of sleepovers or birthday parties.  I don't have the wild escapades to detail and exaggerate and share, then laugh over for the rest of my life.

I didn't have that kind of childhood.  And, as that was the case and there was nothing I could do about it, I turned to books.  Literature that gave me a window into what it was supposed to be like for little girls and teenagers who lived in nice neighborhoods and had others their age all around them that they could be friends with.  When you're growing up in the U of M area, and you just so happen to be female, you're already limited beyond belief.  Not to mention that most of the neighbors are older folk with their children long gone, or college-age people who party until late in the night and never show their faces otherwise.  You must understand this.  For a girl to grow up and be "best friends" with the older lady and her husband next door...surely this gives you an idea of my desperation.

You will understand, then, why books became my refuge, and why they still mean so much to me.  Certainly, as I got older, there were some other children; I went to a church, so there were a select few others that I was able to befriend, but seeing someone every Sunday morning for a couple of hours, then going right home isn't enough.  Anyone could tell you that.

I won't blame anyone.  That would be opening a can of worms I'd rather save for my deathbed, when I need to get away and fish one last time before I see true glory.  It is better now, as I am older and (hopefully) more mature.

But, as you now have a brief notion of where I come from, surely you understand a little of my jealousy.  I see the pictures others have, and I envy that which could have been mine.

I also grieve the loss of a life I have never - will never - know.  I don't have carefree days.  But that's a story for another time.

Huh.

It's funny how now, when I look back over what has been and, being who I am, brood and sorrow over the past, I begin to see in my past the hand of a mighty Person.  You see, me being irrevocably who He made me to be, I wouldn't have what I have with Him now.  God only knows my past - the truth of the matter, so to speak - and He's the only one I can think of to trust with my future.

Yeah.  I'm not conventional.  God made me to be different.  I am beginning to see that even in my tendency to mull over things and grieve for myself, His hand is at work.

I don't have all the pieces.  I doubt I ever will.  But they're resting in the hands of a Someone who cares infinitely about how they will fit together - just so, and unlike anyone else's.

I think I can live with that.

Without envy, and without regret.

~Fumble