Another year, baby girl. Twenty-two years of life and living to celebrate.
I have been thinking about this birthday for weeks now, somehow it is haunting me as though there is something of greater significance than my eye can see, my mind can imagine.
Years before your birth there was a popular movie, called Dances with Wolves. None of it’s story really matters, just the name and story of one of the main characters, Stands with a Fist.
After another group had killed her family, Stands with a Fist was raised by a Sioux medicine doctor. She suffered the teasing and name calling of others, who only saw their differences. One day, she hit another woman in the face, hard, and she fell to the ground. The teasing ended that day, so began her tribe name of Stands with a Fist.
When Stands with a Fist first appears in the movie she is in deep mourning, for the husband who had died. She is seen injuring, mutilating herself, trying to create visible scars for the agonizingly painful invisible ones she felt, deep within her heart.
So, you might be wondering, what does this movie, this Stands with a Fist chick have to do with your birthday?
Well, you’ve had a season of losing your foundation, your security. You’ve experienced, in a number of situations, the impact of being different (even bullied in direct and indirect ways). You have struggled in your health, relationships, work, education, finances.
But, I saw something change in you … something that was never part of your nature before.
You started to raise your fists.
Not physically, of course, for your nature is non violent, but mentally, emotionally, relationally. You started to stand up for yourself, advocating for yourself, protecting yourself.
There is a strength in you, that I have not seen before, emerging. You are doing the hard things, the awkward things, the self-preservation things, not giving into the bullying of your struggles, but hitting back, refusing to stay in the dust.
Out of discouragements and heartbreaks and struggles and violations of all sorts there is a refusal to wallow and a move towards health … whole and complete health.
I see you rising from the dust of weakness and building a foundation that is partially what you first were given, and part the experience of life.
Know, though, that you do not have to fight these hard things alone …
Happy Birthday baby girl … may this resilience only continue to grow in you.
“We are pressed on every side by troubles,
but not crushed and broken.
We are perplexed
because we don’t know why things happen as they do,
but we don’t give up and quit.
We are hunted down,
but God never abandons us.
We get knocked down,
but we get up again and keep going.”
2 Corinthians 4:8-9
itsawonderfilledlife 