adj.
1. Having an unknown or unacknowledged name: an anonymous author.
2. Having an unknown or withheld authorship or agency: an anonymous letter; an anonymous phone call.
3. Having no distinctive character or recognition factor: "a very great, almost anonymous center of people who just want peace" (Alan Paton).
Have you ever felt anonymous? It is a lonely feeling. It is a time in life when you know something is missing but you aren't really sure what it is. We all go through seasons in our lives when our schedules are clear and we are not over involved with activities and groups. But, when a season of anonymity comes upon us not of our own choosing but through someone else's decision, it finds us feeling adrift, unsettled and alone even when we are with our family or other people.
This is how I feel right now. After years of working in law offices, belonging to church choirs, playing in musical groups, having numbers of friends who I met along the way that led me to learn to cross stitch, quilt and scrapbook, join PTA, and, last but not least, study the Bible, this season of anonymity is upon me. When we are overbooked and schedule weary, we crave days of quiet and filled with nothing. When we are under booked and schedule empty, we crave days of activity, times with friends (who are far from us), reasons to get up and go!
When you have left behind a life that was filled with reasons to get up and go, it takes time to adjust to the quiet. My days are far from quiet due to homeschooling a 9th grader and keeping connected to our dear daughter at college. I guess what I miss the most is the sense of community that we had in our lives, when we lived in Belgium, France and the Netherlands. The people in our lives here are occasional contacts vs. consistent interactions which bring about that needed sense of community. It feels temporary but is lasting longer than that word usually means.
I'm reading a wonderful book that was suggested to me by a dear friend, Kristen Logan (who I met via PWOC). The title of the book is "Anonymous: Jesus' hidden years...and yours" by Alicia Britt Chole. The description is: "We all experience times of hiddenness, when our potential is unseen and our abilities unapplauded. This book redeems those times by reminding us that though we often want to rush through these anonymous seasons of the soul, they hold enormous power to cultivate character traits that cannot be developed any other way!" This book definitely helps explain why each step in our life is the main event. Here is a quote from the book that I just read and want to meditate on before reading further:
"In moments when I am tempted to treat this gift called time as though it were some unfortunate filler,
I hear a gentle whisper from God in my soul: "Child, I am the God who wastes no man's time.
To me, every course in your life is main.""
Jane, you don't know how much I understand what you mean. I've been feeling like that over here for a long long time. If you want to talk, you know where to find me.
ReplyDelete