Post 16: Envy? NOT! (Part 2)

ENVY

'Tis a jacked up emotion, it is.

'Tis first cousin to jealousy, covetousness, and a host of other negative emotions.

But I read an interesting piece of scripture, Psalms 73, posted in part I of this post, that made me understand that it is indeed an emotion that everyone has had in their life at one time or another, and it helped me understand something else very interesting:

I am not alone.

I am not alone when it comes to envy. It was something I had in the past, and since yesterday, I've been thinking really, really, REALLY hard about it.

Am I envious of anyone?

The answer to that question is an unequivocable NO.

And I must say that I feel for anyone who has envy issues. I really do. Especially when you get my age. That was more of a thing of my teens and twenties. When you get my age, those well rooted negative emotions, well... you gotta do some hard work to uproot them.

Much like trying to dig up a 100 year old oak tree with a toothpick.

(And ya'll know how I feel about my toothpicks, lol).

But something happened that stopped me COLD.

Let's just say, God must've been fed up with me whining in my prayers.

Come to think about it... this stuff that happened, it changed the way I pray.

And that's a good thing..

So, let's get into this. It was a bit incredible, and looking back, it still feels incredible.

But I am glad it happened. And it happened during a dark time in my life.

Sometimes, some craziness has to go down to set your heart straight.

~fuzzy wavy lines, stepping back in time, circa the year 2000~

In N.ew Orle.ans back in the year 2000, right after I had come off of a bad depression and was in the process of renewing my relationship with God, I was caught up in a terrible marriage, living away from my family, and what-not.

My marriage was so bad that I wouldn’t even go home most of the time… I would show up just enough to get home and get my mail, wash clothes, etc… Basically, I just wanted to show my face, so that I wouldn’t be accused of anything weird like abandonment…

I had a lot of friends all over N.O. that I stayed with, without too many questions asked. They all pretty much knew my situation: bright, smart, and successful sister stuck with "Oldboy".

I remember two of my married friends in particular…

For the purposes of this post, I’ll just refer to them as “Jane” and “Rita”.

Jane, a custodian at my place of employment, had been married to her husband for approximately ten years. She didn’t make much money, and her husband was the breadwinner of the household. They had a very nice simple three bedroom, two bathroom home. She had a three older kids (who were adults) from a previous marriage, and a ten-year-old daughter with her current husband. She didn’t drive, but her husband would pick her up every day from work. I was strung out without a car at the time, and since my apartment complex was on the way to their homes, they would drop me off or pick me up for work.

Rita was a scientist that I worked with. She had been married to her husband for approximately 20 years. They had two bright teenage children. They also lived near me. Rita was another person that I sometimes bummed a ride home with from time to time. (I hated catching the bus!).

But I spent large amounts of time with both of these couples and their extended families. One of the only things I absolutely LOVED about N.O. was the size of the families, and how everyone got together on holidays, etc… I spent so much time with these people and their extended families that you would have thought I was a cousin or something… It just did so much for my heart to have somewhere to go in the midst of all my mental anguish, and not be in my awful apartment, away from my own family, who were back in the ATL.

Well, I remember early one morning sitting in my office having a little quiet prayer time before I got my day started. I remember saying something to God that morning. I had been thinking (meditating) on what I prayed to Him about for at least a couple days…

“Oh God, how I wish my marriage was like Jane’s and Rita’s marriages. Please make my marriage like theirs!”

I think I had been crying a little bit, because my husband and I had had a huge push and shove fight the night before, a night where I actually decided to spend some time at home. All I know is that it was one of those days where I did NOT want to be at work…

I heard extremely clear in my spirit….

“No you don’t.”

Shoot… I know that THAT didn’t come from me.

I remember saying too fast… “Yeah, right!!!”

I even rolled my eyes…

“And I will show you why you don’t.”

Now, I have to admit, I did something that I know that God has a problem with me doing to this very day…

I got pissed off.

(Hush. I'm much better about not being that way as I get older. Really, I am).

I mean, here I was, hating life because I was stuck off in N.O. with Oldboy, caught up paying bills and rent all by my lonesome because Oldboy had decided that “he needed his money for other stuff”… I had no car, I was away from my family, fighting depression and loneliness, just hanging on to a bit of hope, had just started going back to Church, had just started back praying and learning to believe God again for a bit of help…

And God was speaking to me… He obviously was speaking to my spirit, because that didn’t come from me…

“Trippin!!” is what I remember saying, and immediately turning on some music and getting to work…

“You got to be kidding me!!” I exhaled aloud, my voice shaky because I was about to start crying again.

I’d decided it was too doggone quiet, and I needed to stop praying because I was obviously hearing things… And I didn’t need to hear anything else to have me all upset…

A few hours later, while I was still sitting in my office, Jane’s 18 year old daughter “T” came into my lab. She was an intern downstairs with a scientist in my group. I remember her peaking in my huge office window, and raising her eyebrows as if to ask if she could open the door and come in… I was a bit miserable at the moment and really wanted to be left alone to brood in peace, but I waved her in.

Let me interject here that the younger folks who interned around the building liked me a lot, and enjoyed coming to my office because I liked the same music they did, and we could always shoot the breeze, or I would help them with homework, etc… And I enjoyed their visits. It felt good to hear a coworker say, "My child don't talk, but he will talk to you. He looks up to you."

So, I was VERY popular with the youngsters.

Well, T, she quietly opened my door, walked in, and quietly shut the door behind her, like she was scared. This wasn’t like her… She was always so bubbly, and made sure to talk as much as possible, so that I could laugh at her thick N.O. accent.

“What’s up, whoadie?” I asked, as usual.

She was quiet.

I turned my music down. I noticed that the auburn weave she had gotten the previous week was gone. “You alright, T?”

She shook her head no.

I sat there and waited for her to say something…

“Matt [Jane’s husband] jumped on me last night,” she said in a voice so small that I could barely hear her.

I sat there thinking, while she weeped a little. I mean, I’m thinking… Nice Matt? The Matt who picks Jane up everyday, gives Jane money, takes Jane everywhere she needs to go… the Matt who always spend so much time with his ten year old daughter?

Nice, sweet, happy Matt jumped on her?

T went on to tell me about what happened the night before. (Jane wasn’t home). She said that she was suppose to keep the younger daughter the night before, so that Matt could go somewhere, but she was late getting home. He ended up getting physical with her, throwing her on the floor, snatching the weave out of her head, smacking her around, etc.

“What?” I asked in disbelief. “Did you tell your mother what happen?”

She nodded her head. “Yes.”

“Well?” I asked, after she sat there for a moment.

“She kind of just walked away. Said there was nothing she could do about it.”

“What?” I asked.

“I need you to talk to her for me, LadyLee. I can’t go back there. He put me out.”

Dayum, I thought. I was trippin’ over what she was saying.

Now, I don’t have any children. I only have my brother, who might as well be my kid. But there is one thing I know: if a dude hits your child, all hell should break lose up side that negro’s head. And I couldn’t believe Jane didn’t immediately call the police or somebody on that dude!

“Please talk to her for me, LadyLee!” T wailed.

“What you want me to say, T?” I asked. I mean Jane didn’t call the police or anything.

What WAS I suppose to do?

I gave T a hug, and she sat in my office for awhile. I think she wanted to be somewhere where she could just be quiet and gather her thoughts. She needed to figure out what to do.

I left and went downstairs looking for Jane. She was sitting in a room where a lot of the custodians gather, but she was alone. I walked in and closed the door behind me.

She greeted me with the usual “Hey Dr. LadyLee!”, something that I always hated, but a lot of the black folk in the building were so happy to see a black person walking around with an official title that they absolutely refused to call me by my first name. So I had gotten use to it a little.

“Yeah, um…Jane,” I started.

“How’s it goin’, Doc?”

I hesitated a moment, kind of trying to collect my thoughts. “Yeah, um, I talked to T. She’s up in my office right now. So what happened?”

Jane broke eye contact with me. “Look,” she said, “Matt said that he and T had a little disagreement, and she was being disrespectful, and you know, that’s all that happened.”

*Crickets*

I didn’t know what to say, or what to do for that matter. I just left and went back upstairs to my office to talk to T. I told her what her mother had said.

“LadyLee, I ain’t lying about this! Look at my hair,” she wailed while turning around for me to see the back of her head. “He snatched my hair out!”

I knew she wasn’t lying. It looked real quick to be one of them situations where Matt had basically said she was lying or something. I had been around T for a couple years by this time, and she was basically a normal teen: going to school, working her intern job, hanging with friends, getting ready to start pre-med in college, etc… She, like a lot of the young people around there, always came to talk to me about all of their business, etc… She wasn’t a fast tail girl or anything…

“T, calm down,” I said for lack of not knowing what the hell else to say. “What are you going to do? Where are you staying? Do you need some money? What do you need from me?”

She said she was straight with her money, and she was staying with a friend. She said she was tired of Matt’s bullshit.

When she said that, that let me know all was not too well in their household for a good minute. This wasn't something out of the blue. There had been crap going on long before this incident occurred. And that freaked me out.

Jane pulled me to the side later on that afternoon, trying to explain why she didn’t call the cops on Matt. “Look Doc, I’m here, you see I’m a custodian, I can’t take care of myself and my youngest child alone. I have a nice house and all. I had to make a choice.”

Had to make a choice. Damn.

That made my head hurt when she said that. I didn’t respond, just let her talk… She rambled on, making excuse after excuse.

I was standing there wondering why a mother would let a man abuse her child. I didn’t understand then, and I don’t understand now.

I was sitting at home later that evening, thinking about the day.

And I remembered my prayers earlier that morning, how I had wailed about wanting my marriage to be like somebody else’s…

“No you don’t… And I will show you why you don’t.”

Since this post has ran a bit longer than I would’ve liked, I won’t really go into Rita’s story…

I’ll just let you know that I saw, that very same week... that Rita’s marriage relationship was not all it’s cracked up to be. Rita had come to my office one afternoon to chill and for a couple of hours, expressed how she had a deep hatred for her sorry ass husband and how she didn’t respect him. She detailed all of the crap she hated about him…How she’d been feeling about him for the past 20 years…

It all shocked me something terrible. I mean, I still loved oldboy, but I didn’t HATE him. We were just growing apart, and I was hurting, but there was no HATE…

Man, I had to listen to Rita's cuss soaked craziness for 2 WHOLE HOURS. I couldn't run. Heck it was my office!

Rita’s marriage was definitely not a model for what I wanted my marriage to be.

God allowed me to spiritually “see” a few things that week… and I must admit, I was a bit unnerved over it all…

Geez…

I had to learn that lesson the hard way: Stop envying people. You don't know WHAT'S going on behind closed doors. You should trust me on that. I bet the house on that one.

No idea whatsoever.

I do appreciate a spiritual chin check from the Lord when I really need it. Seems like such experiences affect the course of my thoughts, which eventually affects the course of my life.

These days, if there is any doggone semblance of me looking at anybody sideways thinking, “Gee, I wish I could be like them! Why can’t my life be all great and perfect like their life?!?!…

…I scratch all that. I’m real quick to repent of such crazy thoughts…

As a matter of fact, I can't remember the last time I've felt that way. Maybe it was waaay back then, in the year 2000. Because after that, I ain't even letting the thought enter my mind of wanting to be like someone else or have what they have...

Because I know that God knows what’s really going on with people…

No wonder He looks at the heart!

We’re all under construction, you see. We all have our own God-given assignments, purposes, and portions. Enough so that there is really not enough time to be pondering other folks “seemingly” perfect lives.

Of course, there is a healthy side to all this. I believe God places mentors in our lives. God brings people across our lives who serve as positive role models, who help us in a time of need, who build us up, etc…

I have SO many mentors. (Shoot man, some of them don't even know they are mentoring in certain areas.)

And I have people in my space who I truly admire. But I truly understand healthy admiration versus wanting what someone else has.

People who's purpose is to be of a help to you in this life walk, to help you be all that you can be, in fulfilling your dreams, goals and purposes.

I learned a painful lesson that week… to the point that I seriously sit down to this very day and REALLY get before God and REALLY check myself if I so much as THINK I may be getting too close to wailing about wanting my life to be like someone elses… I just can’t have that… And if I am being like that, I need for him to point it out to me there in prayer, NOT by showing me what’s up with folks…

There was a bunch of me just running around saying quietly to myself "Lord, I-, I-, I- am so so so sorry. I do understand now! I really do. I won't envy ever again. I am SO sorry!!"

I don’t EVER EVER EVER want to experience what I experienced back then again!!

I have to walk out my own path… I don’t know what God has down the road for me.

All I know is that God was looking out for my mental well being future-wise that week…

Because being envious and covetousness can be a terrible way of life…

I have a full understanding of that now, down to the very core of my being…

An understanding that no one can ever take from me.

And for that, I am grateful…

Really though.

My old pastor in New Orleans said that you want to be able to pray and listen to the still small voice in your heart and do what you have to do... If you being hard-headed, someone's will come along and say, "The Lord said A, B, and C!" And if you still trippin' then you get the crazy "burning bush" experiences like above.

"You don't want any "Burning Bush" experiences, like what Moses had," he said. "Just pray and learn to do what you have to do."

That there, what you just read, was LadyLee's Burning Bush experience. In the midst of all my imperfections.

I don't care to go through that something ever ever again.

But Lord, if that's what it takes to bust up some negative emotions from my soul...

Hey... I welcome it.

That was a really strange transformational time of my life back then. But it shaped me... it has help me understand a few things about our complex human nature and situations.

And that what I just described... let's just say, I will never forget it.