3-25-22 POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVES

It was a lying-in morning, one of those long-awaited rewards for living this long. It took a lifetime to earn, and let me say, at least from this side of it, it was worth it. 

I was lying in bed this morning, with nothing compelling me to get dressed and go to a meeting. I laid there praying in my head. I do this on lying-in mornings. It usually starts with me thinking about someone in my family. Sometimes it’s a struggling friend, but more often than not it’s family who gets my first layer of prayers. I’ll get to thinking about how this person is having a  struggle, (and let’s face it, someone always is) so I knock on God’s figurative door and ask if I can come in and have a talk. 

To be truthful, I tend to do all the talking. I think about, let’s say, one particular grandchild… and then I start thinking about their mom, so I pray for her, and then their dad… and so it goes until I’ve basically gone through my whole family, if I haven’t fallen back to sleep from mental exhaustion first. So my prayers might go, in condensed form, something like this…

”Please bless my Sophie, and my Ashley, and my John….” 

Because everyone is so affected by the others in their immediate family, I generally go through the whole family, then jump over to a cousin or sibling, until I have eventually visited my whole clan.

This morning as I was praying I micro-focused on the word “my” as it was repeated over and over in my supplications. I own these people in my heart and calling them mine feels endearing to me. But for some reason this stuck out to me today, so I started repeating my prayers, but instead I said, “Please bless your Sophie”… and so on. 

It was remarkable to me how my feelings shifted. The emotional shift was so powerful I had to sit up from my prone position and ponder what was going on. 

I spent all morning, while digging through and cleaning out a messy cupboard in my bathroom, pondering why it felt so different to change what is grammatically called the possessive adjective; changing my to your.

The idea of possessing lies at the root. Who we are to other people is not so much who we present ourselves to be but what they perceive us to be. While I may think I am presenting one way to someone, they may be seeing me in a completely different way. When I over-ponder it, I conclude that there is no way for anyone to see someone as they truly are. 

Unless, for instance, you’re God, who knows the beginning from the end, who knew us a thousand years ago and has a vision of who we will be in a million years. Unless you’re God and know how far to push and prune to allow proper growth. 

Our Sophie

God’s Sophie is a lot more complete than my Sophie. There is a sort of calm that quickly comes to me when I refer to her as God’s Sophie. I give her to Him and let him prevail. Because I trust him I can let go of my Sophie. I’m not sure if I am explaining myself very well. My thoughts don’t line up as easily or nearly as pretty as the glass bottles of perfume in the cupboard I organized this morning.

We tend to, we humans, think we know more than we actually do. Especially when it comes to other humans. I don’t even know myself very well. At all. So, I am relieved that God is a little “possessive”, that he modifies the noun that is me, knowing that my Life is a whole lot longer in the making than this particular life.