MEMORY FOAM

Who is your ‘memory foam’ person? Or what is your ‘memory foam’ place?

What do I mean? Well, memory foam, to me, is a wonderful, soft, safe material that accepts and conforms to my form every time I touch or lay on it. 

I don’t know about you but I long for places I can just be me in, people I can just be me with. I yearn for people and places where I feel completely safe and accepted.

Unfortunately, such places are hard to come by. For me, anyway. I have been realizing (more? again? more deeply?) that I move through life, through places, groups, relationships, activities wearing a kind of cloak or cape that ‘protects’ me from all these areas. 

The cloak looks light though it is grey and impervious. If flows around me never quite conforming to my shape. It flows and shifts as winds (aka atmospheres) flow and shift around me in whatever environment I’m in at that moment. Sometimes its hood is up covering my head and shadowing my face. Sometimes the hood is thrown back, making me somewhat more ‘visible’ or recognizable.The cloak was given to me piece by piece – and I accepted it as right and fit and I have kept it in good condition for most of my life. 

It is stitched together from phrases such as, “You should…,” “you ought to…,” “you need to…,” “you have to…,” or maybe “Good people/believers never…,” or “…always…,” or “…should…”

Expectations.

Shoulds.

Ought tos.

Musts.

Have tos.

The cloak is all about ‘measuring up.’ ‘Up to what?’ is determined, to some degree, by wherever I am. But the cloak also says, clearly, with almost every thread woven into it, that I can never quite ever measure up. 

It’s a weighty cloak. It’s such a part of me that many times I hardly know I’m wearing it.

But its weight is bothering me more and more.

I grow weary from carrying all its admonitions around with me. 

Tired.

At times now if feels prickly, scratchy, more uncomfortable, more restricting.

Would that I could throw it off and lay down on a wonderfully soft, accepting memory foam mattress about a foot thick! 

Would that I could just be me … regardless of all those expectations and judgements and measurements …

Surely there is a place where I can!

One or two relationships provide memory foam moments. These are greatly treasured.

But there is one place, if I can truly, internally embrace the truth (the Truth) where the memory foam is thick … thick as one could ever want or dream or hope. 

I want to wrap me in the memory foam He provides and carry it everywhere with me – replace the cloak with His memory foam. 

With Him I can be so safe, accepted … where all of my ‘form’ is welcomed … where I can release and relax and lay, cloakless, sinking into the memory form of His love.

Do you have such a place? Or person?