Goodbyes can be painful and some people wont say it. My one Grandmother was that way. I lived close to her for a while and she would never say goodbye, I thought it was because we lived close and I always saw her. Then we moved a little over an hour and a half away and when I cam to visit still no goodbye, she would say to tell her until next time or see you latter. I never really understood why she wouldn’t say it but as I got older and had more goodbyes I came to understand her a little more. They are hard! I don’t care how much of trying to look at every end has a beginning sometimes you just have to be in the moment of the hard goodbye in order to fully morn and move on and that’s how I was a few months ago.
I had been like my Granma and had put off saying goodbye. So I had a goodbye to a dream party. I know it sounds crazy but I needed to do that in order to move forward to this next part of my life. I had been putting off saying goodbye for to long and it was finally time. I had put off saying goodbye to my dream of being a nurse, I know it seems a bit dramatic but to me ever since I was a small girl that’s all I ever wanted to be, a nurse was all I could think of. Sure I had some back up dreams but I’m thinking that the world didn’t need anymore Charlie’s Angels or Nancy Drew. I remember the first time I had to initial in a chart I was excited but it did get old and sometimes I would complain about the day to day duties of a nurse but when it came down to it, I loved it but I knew that the scrubs I was hanging on to ( just in case I got better) needed to go. I gave most away then the last scraggly few I put in a bag with a long goodbye letter then went out and dug a hole, burying them. I’m sure if anyone would have looked over the fence as I had tears running down my face and a shovel in my hand at a hole, they would have thought it was pet. After a time of tears I realized how I must have looked and started to laugh at myself. I was ready to go inside and start my life doing something totally new.
This might sound a lot to do just for a vocation but after I did it I felt better, I felt like I was able to move on with my new normal and all the good stuff that is coming. I still sigh at times when I see scrubs or hear about a health problem but its not as often and it doesn’t come with the sadness it once did or even the longing. I know that I am enough even with out the abbreviations after my name.
Psalm 139:13-16 ESV
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.