Do you ever wonder if things really do happen for a reason? I know that’s one of those over-used and sometimes obnoxious phrases… brought out only when something bad happens and nobody can explain why, right? And for many of you it does absolutely no good to hear it when you are actually in need of believing it. When you’re really down, when you’re hurting, when you’re depressed; you just wish things could be better, you don’t care if there is a reason for what happened.
I’m going to get a little personal here; more than normal.
I have been hurt many times by many different people in my life. Every time I feel as though I can trust someone, something happens to show me exactly how wrong I was. I’ve reached the point where I start to watch for it with every new person I meet. I wait for them to do something, anything, to show me how they are just like everyone else. I nit pick at every word they say, and I analyze every action. I sometimes overreact, jump to conclusions, and misunderstand what people are actually trying to say in my never-ending quest to prove they really don’t care and they are about to let me down one way or another. You start to wonder if it’s something about you that makes people want to treat you so poorly, and once you convince yourself of that it has a tendency to actually come true. Self fulfilling prophecy, I believe they call it.
I met a woman once who believed that people in general were mostly good. She believed that the majority of people really cared about others, and that they did good things for each other all the time. She was a Humanist, and she believed in the inherent goodness of humanity as a whole. She claimed that everyone in her life was a loving caring person who would never do anything to hurt her. My reaction was that she must be the luckiest person in the world to have never met anyone who did not fit that wonderful description of humanity. Either that or she is just the best judge of character ever and always picks the right friends!
I must be the exact opposite of this woman. If she’s the luckiest person, I must be the unluckiest. Or I’m the worst judge of character ever.
So, why does this happen to me? And why do I bring it up?
When I think about how badly I have been hurt, how horribly I have been treated, I think about children who have been treated as bad, or worse, during their lives. During their very young lives. Children who have been abused, neglected, ripped from their families, the only families they have ever known, and thrown into someone else’s home.
I think about how hard it is for me to trust, how difficult it is for me to open up to people now, and I wonder how much harder it must be for those children. As I mentioned in a previous post, at least I had the benefit of growing up in a wonderful, supportive family. I was shown how people should be before I was ever faced with the reality of how most of them truly are. I am able to counter all the selfishness and greed in the world with the knowledge that there really are good people out there, even if you have to search hard to find them.
So, maybe things do happen for a reason. If you believe they do, then maybe I’ve gone through all of this pain over the years so that I may be better prepared to help a child who has been through even worse. Is it possible I’ve found my purpose?
We may not be able to help the child we end up adopting, we may never be able to get through to her, but at the very least we can show her that there are people who care just because they care. And that, in my opinion, can really make a difference.