the house on a rock

 I've been a 'good Christian girl' for as long as I can remember. A rule follower with a sensitive conscience and a desire to love everyone and be loved in return. With a few scandalous years mixed in between, you could call me at my core a goody two shoes. I challenge that sometimes with rap music I listen to and some of my clothing choices but my heart is about as big as they come. Life for me has been pretty black and white. There's right and wrong and that's it. There's Republican and Fox news and then lies. There's good people who look and act like us and then there's those who are wrong who we must show them how to be more like us to make them more right. I've bought into this for decades, and thought my heart has always been one that didn't believe I was being manipulative, rather that I was actually helping people be better by subconsciously diving into my own tightly held belief systems. I'd show them. I'd love them so much that ...

 I've traded one relationship for another my entire life. In fact I don't know that there has ever been a time in my life that I wasn't interested in someone, one foot in the door and the other out. I know this is deeply rooted in insecurity and an uncertainty in who I am and Whose I am. This has ebbed and flowed over time but has done me a large disservice. I was first engaged in 2006 to my college sweetheart who I treated as anything but. I couldn't remain physically or emotionally faithful to him because, frankly, I didn't want to. I had such a desire to run and play with reckless abandon while desperately wanting someone to love me. I didn't know me to love me so how could I expect anyone else to? It wasn't fair to ask someone else to love me more than I did. After years of off and on dating he rightly ended things for good. I moved out of our apartment that he cosigned on but never lived in October of 2008.  I moved in with my parents and reconnected wi...