I am an introvert. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like people…or don’t enjoy being around them. It just means that when I need to recharge…recenter…fill up my cup…I need time by myself. It also means that when I am out and about I don’t usually strike up conversations with random strangers. I will be polite…say hi…maybe a little “ope…let me get past ya” if the situation warrants it, this is MN after all…but that’s it. One of my closest friends is an extrovert. She will strike up conversation with literally anybody…a lady running a booth at the farmer’s market…a shop owner…or like yesterday afternoon, some random dude on the patio at Caribou. Granted…this time he approached us first…but where I would have been “no, I am not the person you are looking for” and done my best Jedi mind trick to get him moving on his way, my friend proceeded to carry on a conversation with random dude. The meeting of two extroverts…worst nightmare for an onlooking introvert like me, who is really just feeling resentful of random dude for butting in on her time with her friend.
And why even bring it up? Because now it’s almost 2am…I’m obviously not sleeping…and instead I’m thinking about the random Caribou conversation which happened to be about religion. Random dude thought he recognized us from Church…my friend, who has her doctorate in apologetics, said “no, but I do preach two Sundays a month at a different church”…yada yada. I tuned out until I heard my friend say something about love and fear…that according to the Bible, love is the opposite of fear. And that is what had me digging through my closet looking for my Bible…1 John 4: 18 “There is no fear in love, but perfect love cast out fear; for fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not reached perfection in love”.
Love and fear as opposite sides of a spectrum has never occurred to me, but my mind is busy turning that around and around and making sense of that in my reality right now. Not that I claim that Jason and I had “perfect love”…I’m sure that the “Godly” people reading this are shouting at me that perfect love can only come from God…but we had “perfect for us” love. And in that love, I had zero fear. That love was my rock. After Jason died, fear started to take over and 4 years later continues to wreak havoc in my life. Fear tells me lies all the time…that I am unlovable…that I am worthless…that I am unworthy…that I only cause pain to those around me…on and on. And thankfully I do have more and more people in my life, like my extroverted friend, who call me on that bullshit.
Hopefully, sleep will be in the cards for me now. Probably shouldn’t have had the XL iced tea at 5pm…
Love, Tennis, and Cancer 