An Open Letter to Pastor's Follow up

My sister asked me the other day if I ever got a reply from the email to my pastor. The answer to that is I did. It came just a few days after I sent him the email and it was a good reply. He addressed my points and assured me that he does not shy away from that topic and has addressed it in church before. I am not sure what I was expecting to hear, but his reply was not it. It took me aback a little and left me a bit speechless. It took me about two weeks to write back to him. There is a lot of underlying junk that goes with a letter like that and his response was basically an open door to address some of that junk. I suppose that is what threw me off guard and left me speechless. You get used to hiding junk, or pretending it isn't there, trying to deny the effects of it on you. Having someone ask you how to help clean your junk away kind of stops you in your tracks. Well it does me anyways. 1. Where do I start pulling from? 2. Do I really want to dig that up? 3. What will I do with that freaky empty space where the junk used to sit? and 4. What if I can't really get rid of it, so instead of a freaky empty space I end up with dusted off junk, no longer hidden in a layer of dusty neglect.

It is kind of like the people on Hoarders. Their houses are so stuffed with crap and junk you don't really know what is there. They just walk over it and it becomes background. Internally, I feel like that sometimes. I have learned to walk around the junk, on top of the junk, between the junk. It becomes background. I am used to it. I may not like it. I may be embarrassed by it, but it is my junk. M.I.N.E. The thought of someone coming in and picking up my junk, holding it, inspecting it, discarding it; well, that gets scary. So, the follow up is really that I am left looking at my junk deciding if I really want to invite anyone else in to help clear it out and organize it. Introspection and an invitation of help is not the follow up I was expecting. Life is rarely what we expect though is it?

I chose the above picture because I think it says more than a house full of garbage does.  Each book tells a story.  It is more than just paper and a cover.  Looking at it like this you have no idea what is inside of each book.  That is kind of like my junk.  There is more to it than what you see.  You have to do some digging, some reading, some study to figure out what is junk and what isn't.  It is all my story.  It is all me.