What I learned in 2016

What I learned in 2016
This year will end in one day (at least in the place where I live) and we will enter 2017. There were a lot of things I learned in 2016. This year has been a roller coaster of emotions for me. It has been a brutal year for me, no kidding.
I learned that God wanted me to be honest with my emotions, in front of Him. I was trapped in my way of thinking, and  assumptions  that some how I could manipulate Him if I just said the right words.  If I pleased Him by saying the things He wanted to hear, then I would get what I wanted.  It's a silly way of thinking.  Another wrong way of thinking was that if I was being honest to God about what I felt,  that God would be surprised and admonished me like my parents are used to do. You know, like those others religious people who have good intentions, I imagined God would say that it's not OK to feel that way or this way. It's not OK to think like this or like that.
Sometimes I was struggling to express what I felt because it made me felt helpless, not religious, below His standard.  For instance,  it made me felt ashamed when I told God that a certain girl broke my heart with her attitude.  To say that a girl was able to do, made me felt inadequate, not as religious as He wanted me to be. I felt ashamed to cry because a girl, because of love. While other friends were  crying for honorable causes like the lost souls in the world, I cried because a woman rejected my offer to have coffee. I prefer just to hide those emotions under the carpet instead of honestly admitted them.
Moreover,  I didn't feel comfortable to dig deeper and answered questions like why I felt what I felt.  Why I reacted in certain ways when I felt certain emotions.  All these questions sometimes are as difficult as math quizzes for me. Sometimes when I tried to dig deeper,  I found what I really needed,  what I lacked.  God wanted me to learn all of these. To lay bare and naked before Him. To drop any fancy, religious words and to just honestly tell Him everything I feel and think, to express them all. Of course He wanted me to express them with respect. He wanted me to explore each emotion, named each as it was. Not using some fancy religious or psychological term.
In the end, I have to admit things that I have known all these times. There is emptiness in my heart. There is loneliness in my life. And definitely I have some heart wounds that haven't been healed yet.
This was not an easy journey.  I felt like an onion being peeled layer by layer. Every layer exposed one part of me I didn't want to see. It showed my fragility,  my weakness, my brokeness.
My social life, especially at my work didn't help me at all. I cannot tell all right now.  The point is the way some of coworkers treated me, it exposed the hurt in my heart. The hurt that showed my damaged self image. The feeling of rejection, that I'm not good enough, fun enough to be anyone's friend.  The hurt that makes me believe I am a bother for others, unwanted,  not welcomed,  invisible.
I see the lessons God wanted me to learn this year, but I didn't pass the test.  I hope in 2017, there will be more progress I make.

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