I didn’t have an abortion, but I paid for one.

Dear reader:  This blog post has been written and ready to post for two years.  Over seven hundred days.  But I have not posted it.  Why?  I was afraid to.  Recently, many of my friends have posted openly about their regret in having abortions, and it has given me courage to share my own regret in paying for one.  

I sat around a table of adults who were there to interview me.  At twenty-one years old, I had butterflies in my tummy and my hands were clammy with nervousness.  I had applied to be a summer camp counselor at Methodist camp that served the poor and elderly in rural North Carolina.  The only question that I remember from that day was this:

“Which person in the Bible do you most respect?”

My answer was Paul, but not for the reasons that you might expect.  It wasn’t because he had served Jesus sacrificially or because he had written a large part of the New Testament.  It was because he made this honest statement about himself in 1 Timothy 1:15, “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, and I am the worst of them all.”

sinners

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When your life is one great big beautiful mess

“Don’t fall. Please don’t fall” I pleaded with the beautiful china plate as I tried to hang it on the wall. I had recently made it with beautiful, sparkly jewels and I was hanging it on my colorful back porch. The plate hanger was hanging over a nail, but I was trying to “engineer” the two together (with a wire) so the plate wouldn’t fall off the nail and break.

And then…

SMASH!

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Your triumphs as a mother are scattered among your failures

I spent a recent morning looking through scrapbooks.  I made the scrapbooks when my children were little because I needed something to look forward to at the end of the day.  I was a stay-at-home mommy to two toddlers that were 20 months apart, and every night at 9 pm, after they were put to bed, I scrapbooked.  I eventually completed about thirty scrapbooks.  I desperately needed that creative outlet.

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The truth is that sometimes I don’t like being me

I have had a love/hate with my personality for 45 years now.  This came to a head recently when I was doing a “personal inventory” of my life for an upcoming speaker’s conference.  The questionnaire asked, “What is your greatest regret?”  As I considered many aspects of my life, my marriage, my parenting, relationships, profession, education, etc., I settled on this one thought.

My greatest regret is being me.

personality

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