I am beginning to realize the darkness of the road that now faces me. I know I asked God to break me again this year, and well, I’m not sure what else I was expecting. When it comes to hard topics, such as regarding my family, I get extra sensitive. It’s not a topic I talk about openly, but I am finding ways now to discuss it in bits and pieces to people who are close to me. You can blame it on cultural differences, personality differences, or just plain old misunderstanding, yet somehow, in my insistence of pursuing “communications”, I have lost my ability to communicate with others. A lot of times I stop myself to reflect, and I ask, “Am I just being a selfish jerk right now?” Often times, the answer is “Yes”. I will admit that, it took a certain level of selfishness to get to where I am today, but do I regret it?  I won’t know until years later.

My opinions of church functions are extremely personal, because much of the time, the hardest of these discussions are heard inside the household. For years I’ve held on to, and believed in the hope that God will lead us all the way through, but I think something happened to that girl who once saw hope as the most beautiful thing in the world. I still see things that way, but I have felt a lot less hopeful in many situations. In fact, in my prayers now, I feel like I no longer ask for God to deliver me from any hardships; all I can ever ask now is that He walk beside me through it all. Is it a loss of hope? Not entirely, but within the past few months, I feel like I have just been slammed emotionally time and time again in such a short span of time. They just came from all directions, and sometimes I still don’t know what to make of my own thoughts. I cannot distinguish the beginnings and ends of each struggle, and it just jumbles together into vicious cycles of emotional whirlwinds.

In allowing myself to start facing some of these struggles, I feel incredibly vulnerable and heavy-hearted. I have full faith in wherever God will bring me to, but even as I feel God’s presence I feel the coming forth of the “darkest moments”. What else could I do but prepare myself, especially when for the first time ever as I prayed, I heard myself think, “I wish we never came here [to NYC]”. Of course that’s probably not true, but for some 2 minutes or so, I whole-heartedly believed and wished that our lives had taken a different turn. All of a sudden, I felt a growing distaste for a city I once felt so hard leaving, and I didn’t want to be here. Brace yourself, Sam. You’re opening some wounds you tried to ignore, and now the damage may be a lot more difficult to mend.