I've told "my story" to maybe ten different doctors and nurses, etc., over the last month, and I'm just so tired. I think it's important. But I just can't do it right now.
Right now is an interesting time. It's like before six months ago, there was the "normal" Candice. The things I felt. The thoughts I had. The tasks in my mind. Then these last six months she's been gone. So strange. So sub reality. Dark. Cloudy. Confusing.
Mostly confusing.
I feel so confused about where I am. I feel so out of touch. Where once my soul and body and spirit and mind were in touch and in sync, now they are all separate entities pulling for attention.
But I feel them all trying to pull themselves back together now at times.
Last night, as I sat in a room with people of the world that seemed to have no purpose to life. And thus no joy. I pondered, analyzed, escudrinar-ed (spanish word that is exactly what I want to say) life, and people in the world, and God's purpose, and us being His children, and my place in His plan, and how I can help.
That was me. That was Candice. That is how my mind is normally thinking most hours of the day.
Wow. Me. I was back.
I went to church today. I felt so disoriented. "I" have been gone so long. So confused.
As I sat and started to feel how amazed I am by the wonderful people I have met in this ward in Boise and how amazing they are and how much they inspire me, my heart was filled with gratitude for God giving me the opportunity to meet and be around them, where not having moved here I would not have had that chance. And that feeling felt foreign. Cause I hadn't had that "Candice" feeling for so long. It wasn't that I felt the opposite, or had any different feelings for the wonderful people around me. It was that I'd had no thought at all. I'd been gone. And so in this moment, that gratitude I felt last summer, that God-like feeling of gratitude, was again permeating my soul. And my mind wandered and realized the last time I felt those feelings was last summer. That's how long it's been since I've felt out of touch.
Cause the last six months I've just had such a clouded and non-Candice mind.
And I realized in that moment, Oh wow. It's me. I'm back in this moment. It's me.
Yet at the same time I realize, I don't think I am suppose to be trying to put the pieces back just the way they were. Some of the good pieces will come back, but a lot of me has been shaped and changed and converted and realigned. Perspectives and situations have changed. A lot has happened. So I shouldn't clamor so badly to "put the pieces back together" cause I don't think that is what God has in mind.
I think He actually wants me to build a new me…
…so I'm at a loss. I've never seen this new me. I'm not sure what exactly the pieces of my puzzle entail. I'm not sure exactly how those pieces fit together. I don't know what the finished product looks like.
I'm not gonna be the old me. So I can't simply reverse the process of "falling apart". But I have to create a new me.
Is it a puzzle? Is it a sculpture? Is it a maze? Is it flat? 3-dimensional? Or something I can't even fathom with my human mind to analogize to?
So it's confusing.
It's like a blank sheet of paper as to who I will be, yet that blank sheet of paper is in a dark room. Cause there is still darkness. There are still shadows. There is still a lot of confusion.
But what I do know is that as I continue to move forward, and continue to try to "become" whatever this "Candice" is to be, that with each effort I put forth, He will light the way.
He will tell me if I should pick up a paintbrush and paint "quiet" into my being. He won't light up the room, but He'll light up that paintbrush.
He will tell me if I should take clay and mold meekness. He won't open the room to the shutters just yet, not until I have submitted the sufficient amount of of faith to Him in this trial. He will light where the clay is, then He will light how to start molding it.
He will tell me if I should grab just the outline of what Candice used to be, all the light I had and the talents I had developed in my spirit up to that point, and then help me fill in the rest of what is to be the new me.
And I just don't know what it looks like. And I just don't know how to put me
Cause it's supposed to be a new me.
Before this trial, I feel like the lights were all on in that room, in that self-molding art studio. I knew who I was, what my goal was in this life, and the direction God wanted me to go. And I was trying with the capacity I had at the time to shape, the best I knew how, me.
But during this trial, the room has been dark. So dark. At times, even pitch black. So pitch black where you can't even see your hand in front of your face. So dark. So lost. So completely lost.
But today, right now, that room is just dim. There is not enough light provided to cast shadows, but just enough light that I know and am aware that I am in that room again. And in that room, I feel like He is showing me a flashlight. Certain points in the room where He has placed some tools. Just enough light to show me where to use that tool on my being and how to start working it.
I believe one day, a day sooner than it is later, He will not only turn the old lights in the studio back on, but that he's punched out some space in the ceilings for some new skylights, He's revealed that there are windows on each side and He will open the blinds, He's replacing my incandescent light bulbs with bright, clear fluorescent ones, and He will give me some magnifying lenses so I know exactly what He wants me to do to shape me, Candice, Candice Theresa, Candice Theresa Calder Andrus, His daughter.
It's not that when this trial is "over" I will have arrived or be where I want to be, but I believe I'll have the light back that will allow me to continue shaping myself, molding, creating, and becoming. It will require work, and inspiration. But the lights, more lights, will be on than ever before.
And today, it's not today, that He has turned on and revealed all those sources of light. But there is the flashlight. And I know that day is coming.
