Eating bad fruit

I think that giving someone you don’t particularly like, a chance, is very difficult to do. It’s an expense of emotional energy the point of which you always doubt because at the back of your mind the questions linger and pop out at your consciousness;

“Would she do the same for me?”

“Is he just using me, like always?”

“Is this just going to be another time when I bang my head and mutter ‘Should have seen that coming, again!’?”

It’s like eating bad fruit; you have to have a certain degree of rare courage to eat a bad fruit, spit it out, and then calmly pick up another one and proceed to peel it. I want to check the fruit, re-check it, poke at it with my knife, hold it up under the harsh glare of the fluorescent light in the kitchen. I don’t want to eat the bad fruit again, and feel that bad taste in my mouth again. I don’t want to feel like a fool who gets had, over and over again. The fool who the not-so-foolish and the hopelessly cynical turn to and gloat at, “I told you not to trust her again”.

But I always think, life is so short and so full of mistakes. I am so full of mistakes. My soul is contaminated as it is with my personal failings and embarrassing little un-Christian habits. Why darken another corner of my soul with a grudge? Because that’s what holding things against someone does. It discolours your heart a little. It taps in to your being’s well of negative energy, and draws forth.

So much easier on the breathing then, to let in. Not trust, maybe, not even get too close to. But to let in. To not just be civil to on a superficial level but find it in your heart to stop clutching at a dislike and to genuinely allow that person in to your space. I won’t be best friends, I won’t even let you be best friends, but I won’t hesitate to talk honestly, to help willingly and to genuinely take joy in the good that comes your way.

I will always doubt but I will not let that doubt get the better of me

. I, in fact, am trying to be better than that.