Okay I first need to start with a confession that is quite
personal. Life has handed me a very
difficult season. One that has brought
up a great deal of pain from the past and even pain in the present and challenged
my ability to find joy like normal.
Tears have been flowing way to freely and sadness was becoming my new
normal. I cannot share all the details,
as ironically the stories aren’t mine to tell, but they have had a direct and
negative impact on my life in more ways than one. To get back to myself, to find my joy again
and to show up for my family, I am currently in therapy. There I said it. I am in therapy. Band add is off. Now to the rest of the story.
I knew given the week I just had this therapy session would
be hard. Hard was an
understatement. It was brutal, and I was
wrecked with emotions. One of the coping
tools my therapist provided was something called the circle of control. Essentially what is on the inside circle are the things I have complete control over and what is on the outside of the circle,
I have none. When I looked at the
drawing of the circle, I made a joke that it looked like a perfectly shaped
avocado. My therapist laughed and
agreed. She encouraged me to look and
stay focused on my avocado to get me through the tough days ahead as I
continued to process this session. My
therapist is a Christian and reminded me, besides the avocado, that God is always
there. He will never leave me or forsake
me (Hebrews 13:5-6). I finished the
session, splashed water on face and threw myself together to be present to pick
up my son, Lewis, from preschool.
Lewis and I got home and went about our normal family routine even though I was struggling. Thankfully being busy with Lewis was a great distraction
to keep the tears from flowing. As the
night drew closer, the sadness and anxiety were working overtime to creep back
in. Lewis and I started our normal
bedtime routine – Dada does the bath, I read three books with him and then we take
funny selfies together on Snapchat before saying our prayers. The Snapchat selfies is a random thing Lewis
loved after doing it with my niece. And it just kind of snuck into our bedtime
routine. This night I was attempting to
hurry through the fun of Snapchat because I was struggling to keep my
emotions intact. Imagine my surprise
when Lewis and I scrolled to the next character and it was an avocado. And not just an avocado but an avocado
dancing to the happiest music. Lewis and
I have been playing on Snapchat for almost a year now and never once had the dancing avocado appeared. My eyes filled
up with happy tears and I laughed out loud at God’s sense of humor. What is more even more amazing about the
dancing avocado is that it only showed up for two nights. It normally takes me about 48
hours after a session to fully process and feel normal again.
Y’all here God was, during Snapchat, showing up big for me. He sent me a dancing avocado. He sent me a dancing avocado for the exact amount of nights I needed. The dancing avocado reminded me that He is always
in control. And even on the hardest days
or the most difficult of seasons, He will never leave me or forsake me.
