This is a beginning.

I don’t like the word ‘recovery’.

I don’t like being ‘in recovery’.

I feel that the term implies that I’m taking something back that was lost,  and I never had much to start with. More so, I’m traveling somewhere new in this process. It’s much more accurate to say that God is transforming me. I’m not retrograding to some golden age in my past and reclaiming that land to rebuild from. My present culmination of messiness is my starting ground.

That’s new for me; being able to accept less-than-perfect. Only within the past few weeks have I actively ceased trying to amputate my past failures and embarrassments.  A woman from my support group put it beautifully. She said she saw her past as violent claw marks on her soul, but that from those pits, God had grown a flourishing garden.

Another woman shared that she sees the hard times as the beginning chapters in her story; necessary, and integral to the finished work. And yet another shared that she sees all of her past and current struggles as important opportunities that allow her to relate with and help others.

Acknowledging the past (and even more, really accepting who and where we have been) does not dictate where we are going. It gives us instead a starting ground to flourish from. We can stop trying to amputate the ‘less-thans’ and failures, accept where we are at, and learn from our personal histories instead of being immobilized by them.

I’m learning to accept my manure pile. And instead of obsessing over how that pile looks now or hoping to get rid of it for a clean start, I’m trusting God to grow something worthwhile and startling from it.