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Normally I don’t try to wax eloquent on philosophical matters (probably because I’m usually so distracted by the poopy bottoms, crayons on the floor, and the leaking sippy cup being carried across my carpet that I can’t really think all that deeply).  But, this one has me really thinking, so I thought I’d share.  And if you’re too distracted by the wailing kiddos in the background at your house, just skip this one and enjoy the funny one I posted yesterday.  :)

I have a friend (I’ll call her Jill) that was recently going through a rough patch with her husband.  In an emotional exchange with him, Jill blurted out a statement that a friend of hers encouraged her to use.  As the words were coming out of her mouth, she was crying out the opposite thing in her head.  While her brain knew that maybe the verbalized words were the best way to protect her fragile feelings, her heart knew it wasn’t really what she wanted or quite possibly even what she needed.

Another time and place, another person encouraged Jill to not do something because it would be terrible and she would wind up lonely and miserable and scared.

A comment on a blog post I recently read was insisting that the author should style her daughter’s hair differently…  Because her daughter had a “five-head” instead of a forehead…  And you don’t want your daughter to grow up taunted by the other kids like I did, do you?     Say what?

And how many times have you heard a mom tell a pregnant woman some horror story about her pregnancy insinuating that every pregnancy has to go that way…  Or heard a married man tell a single man who’s just gotten engaged, “Are you sure you want to do the whole ‘ball and chain’ thing?  Life’s just never the same after you put on the ‘handcuffs’ –  I mean ‘rings’.'”

While I completely understand the need and desire to share our experiences with others, why do we also feel the need to put our baggage on them?

While Jill’s friend may have had a bad experience in her marriage that resulted in her feeling the need to say, “If you’re going to leave, just leave.”, does that mean that Jill needed to say the same thing?  And just because her other friend wound up lonely and miserable and scared, does that mean that Jill had to experience the same outcome?  While I don’t doubt that Jill’s friends were well-intentioned in trying to help protect her from heartache, what they were both doing was putting their baggage from their own failed experiences on Jill and her unique situation.

So, instead of doing and saying what her heart was telling her to do and say, Jill allowed someone else’s bad experience to dictate what her experience would look like.  The reality is that Jill’s situation is at least slightly different than either of her friends’, and yours is different than Jill’s, and mine is different than yours.  While some of the circumstances may look really similar, none of us has the same, exact experience as another.  We all have our own backgrounds and presuppositions and values and hormone levels that cause us to react and respond in our own unique way.  And isn’t that a good thing?

Maybe it’s an eternal optimist being born inside this realist’s heart, but I’d like to think that just because someone else had a difficult pregnancy, or a failed marriage, or trouble potty-training their boy (uh-oh) doesn’t mean that I have to experience the same thing.  In fact, I’d like to think that if I follow my heart, the God inside my heart, then we could co-create a better experience for myself.  Because who knows better about my own background, presuppositions, values and hormone levels than the God inside of me?  Oh, and doesn’t that also mean that He knows the other person that I’m dealing with on that same intimate level? And if I listen to that quiet nudging of my heart, couldn’t it be the best response for everyone involved?

My advice to Jill?  Follow your heart. After listening to her expose some of the deepest yearnings of her vulnerable heart and how incredible those desires were for herself and her husband, how could I say anything else?

Of course, I also told her to take my advice with a grain of salt just to make sure I wasn’t putting any of my own baggage on her.  :)