Everyone is away from home today. Josh has a pastor’s conference in town. The older kids are at school. The younger boys are at Grandma’s after she picked them up at noon and is keeping them overnight. I have class tonight and Josh will be busy through the night hosting the pastors who come back to camp for supper. As always these are only the tentative plans.

We had an incident this morning where a kitchen helper came to prep a few things. I had asked Josh earlier about the leftover food in the dining hall from last night’s supper meal. He said if I wanted it I better go get it, because someone had discovered it and was making plans to take it home and split it in their own determined way. It wasn’t something that had been asked about.

This made me mad. In what was some kind of internal surge of assertiveness, protectiveness, and probably brazen selfishness, I texted the person and said the leftover food was already spoken for. I didn’t want it disappearing by accident. The person replied and said they were glad that I said something. I drove down later and put the trays in the van.

My stomach has been hurting the past couple of days. I feel hot inside, like my insides are inflamed, my joints as well in my hips especially. And it isn’t just physical. It’s like all of a sudden my wounded pride woke up from a nap and started shouting, “Enough. Enough!” And I write things in my journal like, “I’m really going to have to watch it this month.” I ask for awareness.

I believe in the mind-body connection but I also don’t mean to make it more than it is. Certain cycles are more peaceful and others have more disruptions to work through. It’s this combination of alerts to real things that are needing to change, and then having to process what has already happened and needs to be released and let go of. You realize this is called forgiveness.