I had, in fact, a similar revelation, but with dramatically different results.
Our family spent a year in India working with Youth With A Mission, a Christian organization with bases throughout the world. After training at the Lindale, Texas base, we'd gone on an outreach to Mexico City after their earthquake in 1985. We'd been housed in an unfinished hospital building with water so cold in the bathroom's overhead shower, that I got a headache the one time I tried to use it.
After that, we walked, my husband and our four young children, to the banyo once a week for hot showers. On the way, we'd buy pastries. I homeschooled the older children, my husband was on a construction team, I helped with meals. It was a great experience.
The following January, we embarked on an even bigger adventure. It is amazing now, post-911, to remember the bags of sharp tools we took on board the airplane that would take us to the other side of the planet! Four children, age two to eight, living in a foreign country, far from everything familiar.
For almost a year, we lived in one village, then another. We went on an outreach to northern India, where we visited the foothills of the Himalayas. We took rickshaw rides, bus rides, train rides. Our oldest, who turned nine, remembers the most about that year, but we gained so much, even as we slept on a concrete floor, had no running water, ate simply.
All along that incredible journey, I kept journals. Many journals. By kerosene lamplight if the power had gone out during a brown-out, or sitting by the pond watching the kids swim, I journaled. In detail, whether writing about making love on the mat when we knew the children were sound asleep, or a visiting teacher's insight, or an argument that stung to the core.
Our year was supposed to be the first of a lifteime as overseas missionaries, but that was not what happened. Back in the States, we learned that our oldest daughter's medical condition warranted Western medical treatment. We took it as a sign that we should remain here.
During the following three decades, we went through experiences much harder than that concrete floor, more challenging than adapting to a meager diet. It wasn't just the trials and tribulations every family faces as their children grow up. It wasn't just the challenges every marriage faces, or the way life meanders away from expectations and dreams. Issues. Death. Sorrow. Debt. Disease. Aging parents. Job upheavals. All of the above.
Of course, there was also happiness, and growth, and abiding joy. And faith, which kept everything in perspective, that assured me all would be well, that there was purpose, a plan.
Then when our youngest son Adam died in 2000 following a car accident, I sensed -- deep, deep inside -- that as sad as I was, one day joy would return. I didn't know it would be 10 years. Faith was not shaken, but joy was. Moments of joy at graduations or babies or personal triumphs or holidays kept me going, but the overwhelming reacquaintance with joy as a constant companion, beneath whatever else life threw my way ... that was, and is, amazing.
At a writer's group I began attending, we read Writing Down the Soul by Janet Conner, and I found myself thinking about journaling again. I didn't, and don't, journal often, but I was reminded of the old India journals stored in a cedar chest.
One evening, I took out the journals alone and began reading. I skipped pages, skipped months, smiled as I saw thoses faces again, heard the lovely cadence of dialects and the ever-present beeping of horns in the city. I was also appalled at what I saw threaded throughout that wonderful year in India. Many of the same issues I might journal about today, I mentioned then. Some of the same negative aspects of my life. The same heartbreaks and questions. I could have written some of this yesterday, I thought.
I wept against the day my children might find the journals after my death. True, they might understand me better, but I would've already passed on, so what would that accomplish? I didn't want them to see, there in black and white, the undercurrents I had struggled with as they grew up, not without knowing all of the sides of all the stories. And that would be impossible.
And too, I remembered the ruthless room cleaning I had done just before my husband proposed. I had thrown away things other guys had given me, starting new, starting fresh, turning a corner. Within days, we were engaged.
I needed to turn a corner again, if only in my heart. I made a decision.
By then, it was dark. I took the journals to a small fire pit outside behind our house, along with lighter fluid and a lighter, and I burned them to ash. I sat there, poking the flames with a stick, until nothing remained that was readable.
When I told my writing group what I had done, some of them were aghast. Your writing! It's gone!
For me, though, it was cathartic, a symbolic act that the ways in which I had settled, the ways in which I had cheated myself out of happiness, the lessons it had taken me so long to learn but finally had...it was a dramatic gesture, but a grand one.
We talk about "burning bridges behind you" as if it's always a bad thing, but we forget that some bridges shouldn't be built. Some bridges should only go one way. At the time, none of that was in my thinking, and I don't even care if the analogy fits my actions. I didn't try to analyze why I needed to burn the journals, I just knew it would be a good thing.
I wept a little at the loss, yes, but there was hope in the flames.
(c) Ellen Gillette, 2018
