Realizing we are only human...

I don’t want to be another broken, bleeding heart. But... I am. I struggle for the words and the true inner most feelings of my own humanness. I am a man that has withstood the hardest thing a man can stand and I have not won. Yet, I have overcome. I have been strong, yet I have been the weakest I have ever been. I have been bold, yet the meekest I have ever been. I have been inpatient, yet longsuffering. I am a broken man… and that is a good thing. I may not like the circumstances I have gone through. In fact, I hate them with a passion. But they have caused me to become more than I thought was possible. Not because I thought it was impossible to become the man that I am now. Rather, I didn’t think I could get beyond my pride and the stubbornness I have always been told I have and didn’t want to admit to. I have learned the trueness of God’s Grace and the fragileness of being human. I have compassion beyond measure and it is not of myself. Myself is full of the stuff we as men like not to admit to anyone, except those that have the same stuff. And sometimes it only comes out in small trickling amounts as we feel more safe with,and yet get more stupid with an individual. I am looking inner to the true me and when I look in the mirror, I have now actually seen me. The overcoming me. Not the inpatient, abrupt, careless, insensitive, hard core, furrow browed, seething with pain from unseen open sores, ass that I was.

I want anyone who sees me to see this me. The humbled, wiser, more tender, more accepting, more human, more compassionate, less hating, more communicative man that has come from the deep woods furowed deep in my mind where he was lurking from a distance wondering if he was destined to forever remain there, or to be just plain destitute. The woods were a dark, lonely place that made your mind slowly numb and listless. There wasn’t much of a place there to make a home in. That place didn’t allow for homebuilding. It allowed you stand there with little room for motion, but enough room to go further into them. The further into the woods you went, the more the woods would take of you. It is an unforgiving place that only allows for people to escape to. There is no remorse, no healing, and absolutely no forgiveness in the woods, just fear. Fear that is full of dark and silent lonliness.

I guess, even though I consider myself to be a disciple of Christ’s teachings and that I have been empowered by the Holy Spirit to be a conqeurer, I am only as strong as His Grace allows and I am also as weak as my human shell… I have realized that I too am human, and… that those who are around me are human too. I will end with this quote:

To err is human, to forgive divine.

Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism

Kevin D. Franz 8/24/2006