For he who loves his life shall lose it and he who gives up his life for my sake shall find it.

I loved my life. Looking back, Its more than a little unnerving the extent that I loved my life, at least what I had built and projected to the world. I worked at the same company, for the same people, for 10 years. And, I worked hard, for someone else's dream. I started as a web developer and did everything I could, all hours of the day and night, my work became my hobby, my happy place, a source of pride. I put everything of myself into it. After many years I worked to gain more and more responsibilities, integrating all their systems and processes and after many years they gave me the ultimate title: COO.

I was a COO.

This is not a life or a title I could have, or would have dared dream for myself. To me, this was beyond what I deserved as such i was exceedingly grateful. This brought me such a sense of value and pride, it was a core part of my entire identity. To lose this job I had been given, someone had trusted me to do, and paid me well for.. well, to lose this, I will later come to find out, would be to lose my entire sense of self. I had invested my life into someone else's dream, but it never bothered me because it was more than felt I deserved.

I felt happy. I loved myself, and my life. But, unfortunately, my value was driven externally and if your entire sense of self, and value, exists at someone else's mercy, especially something so meaningless and insignificant as a job… Someone elses company, and someone elses dream, you may one day come to see you are in for a bad time.

At least I was in for a very bad time. I never saw it coming but when it hit, it hit like a car accident - fast, hard, and out of nowhere. And it felt like total destruction. My world broke open and there I was standing in the light, in truth, and I was devastated. It felt like everyone saw through me, everyone knew everything, and they always had, my secrets, my sins, my soul was on display and I was truly ashamed because for the first time in a long time I saw who I had become, I truly saw my behavior the way i believed the world saw me, the light exposed it all. I didn't know this at the time, but I now believe that light to have been God/truth/reality whatever you want to call it and I looked upon my shadows and I felt true shame, fear, and humiliation. But, that point is closer to the point that I begged to die. That I refused to walk towards God/light/truth, closer to the death of Michelle Payne.

It started a year before the day I chose death. It started out of arrogance, pride, and ego. It started because I was no longer grateful for what I had, I was comfortable.

My marriage had been on questionable ground since the birth of my Son. His birth changed me, I wanted to be a better person for him. I had a picture in my mind of what a family looked like and we were not that. I dont know where I came up with my pictureske family, maybe TV, maybe social media, maybe my assumptions of what my coworkers lives looked like but I believed that I wanted my life to look like something else, something other than it was. I wanted to sit and have family dinners, i wanted to wake up early and hit the gym, have a family breakfast, send my son to preschool and work. I wanted family time, and to go on evening walks, to play board games at night.

My sister's have that kind of life, they tend to their families and enjoy walks at night with their children and husbands. They do game nights and craft nights. My coworkers talked of similar ways they were living life. I started to get to the gym, I started to better myself, the way i supposed I was supposed to, I started to feel pride in myself, my body, my looks. And all outward appearances said “My life is perfect.” It was. It was perfect. I was successful, I had a beautiful child and family. My husband and I worked together.

I was honest with high integrity- because it was easy to be honest with high integrity. It was easy to tell the truth when the truth was something i was proud of. It is not as easy to be honest and integral when the truth brings you shame. It is then when you find out who you really are. It is only when the truth threatens everything you have, and everything you love, than the truth is much harder. When the only benefit to being honest is for the sake of honesty itself, and nothing else, then is when I found being honest to be impossible. This was a hard realization for me because I had been so honest for so long, as I had nothing to be ashamed of, and nothing to hide so honor came naturally. Until I had something to hide, then I found I had no honor.

The Seed

This must be how the seed feels when the sprouts begin to tear it apart. Transformation can be ugly, can be painful and we can only hope what remains is beautiful. If the seed had a choice to be ripped apart from the inside, would it choose to become the flower? Would it choose to turn itself inside out to become something it never believed it could.. maybe not, but God knows what it can become so the seed is planted and watered anyway and if it could protest I think it would shout, no, please, I am happy, I am a seed. I have always been and always want to be a seed it's comfortable, it is right and we would tell the seed "it's okay, you are to become something great. Just wait."

And the seed would weep and protest it's transformation, it would beg to stay a seed because that's all it's ever known and anything else is total annihilation of everything it knows, everything it believes it is supposed to be.

For the first thing to go is it's hard protected shell and to rip through that would not be safe, it would be exposed, it would be raw, it may now feel the grains of dirt course against it's freshly sprouted heart and it would scream this is suffering, why would you cause me such suffering. And if we could we would tell the seed to be patient because we know it's meant for something more.

And it would take time, for the seed does not become a flower overnight. It would sprout itself through the ground and say it is too hard, the weight is too heavy, I cannot, I cannot. We would do what we could, water it, give it rich soil, but only the seed sprouting raw fresh roots is responsible for its fate.. for we could not touch it, not move the soil around it, we can not disturb it's transformation. It would push out against the dirt and it may say "help me, for i would rather die than go through this and we may pain for the seed but there would be nothing we could do to bring it to the surface and unto light except to sit by its side and tell it that there is something better on the other side, that it was meant for more than sitting deeply in the dirt covered in darkness, it is meant to come into the light and shine exactly the way it was always meant to shine.

And when it surfaced the seed may recoil from the light, fear of this new world in which everyone could see its insides, and at this point the seed may ask "this is it? This is why I was ripped apart? This is why my flesh was bared to the soil, this is why I pushed to the surface? To become a stem? Standing naked for the world to see everything i held protected by my shell? It might scream i did not want this i do not care to be a stem standing naked in front of the world. And then the season would pass and the little stem would sprout a flower and the flower would turn towards the sun, no longer hiding what was once inside and only then could we say "I told you, you were made for more"

And the new flower would look upon the sun with wonder and if at this point you told the seed it could go back into the ground it would now beg, no, please the sun is warm and I want to look upon it, feel it's heat, dont ever cover me with soil and to do that now would kill the seed for it had seen the light.

We are on this earth for grateness to turn from a seed into a flower and with that, sometimes is pain, hardship, forces of darkness pushing down on us sometimes to the point of suffocation, and after you have broke open, and you are raw, and it's scary, you have to keep walking towards the light, because to stop now, just as if the seed did... you would die.

We are meant for grateness.

Every step i took shouted no, this is not your path, this is destruction, this is death but I went anyway because I was so happy as a seed and the rawness and the light threatened everything I had ever known, which unbeknownst to me was the cover of darkness and so I shouted, why are you causing me such suffering, why have you done this to me.

And so I hid, from light, from truth because I thought it would allow me to remain a seed... but I could no longer be a seed... I had already broke open.

And saw the light.

To hide from this, at this stage, meant death and so I began to die.

-

The devil told me "stay. Hidden, this will keep you safe, you can stay as a seed, stay in the darkness hide and a seed you shall be" and a seed having been all i ever knew, I begged for it, to be a seed, to not be broke open and naked, standing in the blinding sun and as we have free will, and the divine cant disturb us without killing us, I was given the opportunity to hide and I took it. I blinded by the light, naked, and raw I said "no, I shall be a seed, and I hid and I began to suffer because once a seed is broke open it can no longer live in the dirt, to do that is to beg for death.

And I began to die all that I had and loved while I was a seed began to disappear.

This is when it will require the most trust and the most faith that God is there to grow you, that God sees you, has always seen you, and wants for you to come into the light.

And when the sun shown down it cast a shadow and as the seed had never seen a shadow before it would be scared and the shadows would not want to be seen as they are from darkness and the light threatens their existence so they will tell the seed to turn around, look at the shadows you have cast, look at the darkness YOU have created and the seed will cry, that's not me, and this is the moment the seed must choose life, and look towards the sun.. because what has been cast is darkness but darkness is not the seed, even though the shadows will try to convince it otherwise.

The only only way to hide the shadow is for the seed to lay and die for it cannot cast shadows if it covers itself in darkness, if it falls to the ground and hides. But if it does this it will never bloom what it was meant to bloom, for the seed cannot fulfill its destiny this way.

And it will die believing it was the shadows never realizing all the things that it had grown, all it's wounds that sprouted new growth, and life... all of these things were the cause of the shadow, yet, each is what made it so beautiful in the first place.

For it was unique and it was exactly as it was always meant to be.

Is it God who turns in disgust at our sins? Or is it us who looks at our shadows and are afraid. I think God is growing a beautiful garden and loves each one of us, asks each one of us to turn away from our shadows to look at him and the light and we shall be saved in his grace. It isn't God, it is us who looks upon our shadows in shame.

We think who are we to walk with God when our shadows cast down across the land, and it is God who says look towards me, not the darkness for you are one of the most beautiful, it is only that you've grown so tall that you are able to cast a shadow such as that, but look not towards the shadows and your past look up at the light, at the sun and you shall grow.

Leave the darkness, leave the shadows and come into light, come into truth and live authentically in my garden and you shall not parish. You will be loved, tended to, and given everlasting life.

Stand proud in who you are because God has grown you from a seed, tended to you when you were injured, sat with you while you transformed, he already knows every injury, every cut, every stray branch, he has been nurturing you since you were a seed and he wants you to look at the sun and shine, no matter how big a shadow you cast.

We are but flowers in the garden of eden.

When light was shown i started turning to blame everyone else, why was i made to suffer so much, why was everyone doing this to me? Nothing at all was happening, only light/truth being cast down.. no one but myself was the cause of my actions or of my suffering I was ashamed and that shame made me thrash around for cover.

Maybe this was breaking through the dirt and seeing the mirror, seeing the shadow on the ground. I dont know how it happened other than to saw the light cast down, the shadow appeared and there it was standing before me a mirror of my sins. People will say it was drugs, it was paranoid delusions, and it won't change what happened. I suddenly believed that everyone around me had been pretending that when discussing a coworker of mine that we were discussing me, secretly. And I had been a bitch... whoops.

Every thing that everyone said suddenly was about me, every person around me a true mirror into my soul, shadows on the ground and it was terrifying.

I yelled, why are you all making me suffer this way? Why have you been so cruel to me? Why have you done this? But, it was all me, to hurt another is truly to injure yourself and I had left a wake of great suffering.

If I had gone into this experience religious I would have yelled at God, but instead I began yelling at everyone around me - thrashing and gnashing of teeth.

Reality shattered in some kind of way that allowed me to see, really see the harm I was inflicting on my family, my ill will towards coworkers and friends, there were my sins exposed. The world had been watching all along, they knew everything, they saw everything and they had been making a joke of it, of me. To say that I was humiliated is an understatement. In front of God and all the world I was instantly humbled.

My sudden “delusions” got me a spot in rehab.