I'm feeling a little low this evening. Normally I don't blog about how I feel - I blog a great deal about what I think but not necessarily how I feel. That's not a lack of ability to feel at all (yeesh! trust me!), but simply a lack of desire to share that with the entire universe through a faceless online medium.

But since I do think so much, often dissecting everything until it's well past its usefulness, I have been thinking about why I feel a little low tonight. It's unreasonable - I had a lovely Thanksgiving dinner with my family and three great people - friends of mine personally - whom I dearly love.

So what's the deal?

I think the deal is that I have a different role among my family than among my friends. Amongst my friends I am the oldest, and usually fall into much that that role entails. Amongst my family I am the youngest, experiencing much of its nature when I am with them. Am I a different person when with the two groups? Not at all - different experiences and environments just draw different parts of me out.

But with the two worlds colliding tonight, so to speak, I felt out of my element. I didn't know how to react to certain things, and I felt uncomfortable, like I was being watched. I think, too, in those situations I feel that I am responsible to my family for how my friends are perceived, and vice versa. Why do I wear so much of this stuff on my shoulders? Why do I do what I'm doing now and analyze away any enjoyment there might have been in the evening with fears of not only how each of them perceived each other but how I was perceived in the midst of it all? And when did I go back to being so self-conscious and fearful of others' opinions? I thought I shed that skin many years ago.

And in that last question of myself I can probably see the reason for my spirits being low so late tonight. That is the old me. I didn't like the old me. I didn't like receiving my self-worth from my friends, because it was like a false start - never quite right and not ever getting me where I wanted to be. I didn't like receiving it from my family, because when I thought it should be there it wasn't, and when it was I didn't believe it anyway. I didn't like how I protected my own heart by jabbing at others'. I did that tonight. And I will likely beat myself up about it for a long while, especially because I called a friend on that very same behaviour just last night (though to his credit his own motives might have been different), and just to top it off he was there at dinner tonight to witness my lack of integrity on the subject.

It is who I WAS. Not who I truly am today. It is hard to see a piece of the past raise its ugly head again. But I need to choose to have faith and believe that I am still a new creation. It is a lie from the enemy that nothing has changed in my life and that the wounds and triggers that I thought were long healed were only just temporarily buried.

I AM a new creation. The old things have passed away. New things have come. Amen. Let them come in completeness, Sovereign Lord.

Therefore if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come. (2 Corinthians 5:17)