Answers vs. Acceptance

Joelle Deyo holds a degree in Fine Arts from Cal Poly, Pomona and is an artist residing in Glendora, California.

Joelle knows the pain of marital infidelity, betrayal and divorce, and she is a survivor of addiction, childhood sexual abuse, and Anorexia.

She brings a wealth of experience to Wings Like Eagles, and is willing to be transparent and real so that our readers who have traveled similar paths will have someone with whom they can relate.

She is an advocate for the recovery process, and is a firm believer that there is hope, and a fulfilling life on the other side of Crisis.

It is Joelle's hope is that her experiences, past and present, will bring perspective and encouragement to those who are in the middle of their own life battles and who have been stuck in the pit, just like her.

I’m one of those people who love to ask why. 

It’s not enough for me to know that a baby can grow within a woman’s womb. I want to know why a single cell divides into two and why those cells divide again and begin to specialize in their functions. I want to know why some cells become heart cells and others become brain cells. I want to know why an organized clump of neurons can tell another organized lump of cardiomyocytes to begin to control the flow of blood in the body. I want to know why the cell nucleus reads and copies strands of DNA into RNA and why individual oxygen, nitrogen, and carbon atoms even “know” to form DNA in the first place. And whenever someone attempts to explain the bottom line to me, I don’t say, “Thank you for that enlightening speech on the radioactive decay of free neutrons.” Instead, I ask, “Why?”

Do you see my problem? My thirst for understanding is nearly insatiable, but sometimes it happens that I can’t dissect something down to its smallest parts and gain a comprehensive knowledge of it.  

My own soul, for example, does not consist of tangible components, which can be studied under a microscope. Within it, all of my experiences, memories, and dreams for the future are contained, as are my feelings of love and fear. It is the little internal driver that prompts me toward one course of action or another, yet it cannot be isolated and analyzed. I call it my “heart,” but it is not made of muscle and blood. It consists purely of elements that are immeasurable. It is the part of me that contains all of the whys – that yearns toward an understanding of itself and of the world around it.

It’s natural to question. It’s part of what makes us human. It’s especially natural to question when we are in a period of healing. We need to ask ourselves why certain life events may have lead to others. We need to know what we’ve been working with so that we can change patterns that haven’t been working well for us, at all.

In this examination we can break down the content of the soul – to a point – and determine its overall health. But even this process has limits. Sometimes we go back as far as we can go, or down as deep as we can go, and at the root of the matter is not an “ah-ha!” but another maddening “why?”

How do we make sense of, or find meaning in our lives when the ultimate questions we’re asking don’t come with ready answers, or when we’re faced with painful, confusing thoughts when we’re in need of comfort, yet our thirst for understanding goes unstated?

I know that even if I go to bed tonight and lie awake asking the greatest existential question in the history of great existential questions, and spend the whole night biting my nails as I wait for the answer to pop into my head, I still have to get up tomorrow morning and be. I have to get up every morning and be until my days on this earth, in this body, at this point in time, are done.  

I have some options available to me as to how I might go about doing this. I can move forward in anger and frustration over all of the things I don’t yet understand and hurl blame at everyone and everything around me. I can live in a perpetual state of internal torment over the unknowns. I can put up walls and block out every uncomfortable feeling. Or, I can choose to follow the path of acceptance.

I talk a lot about acceptance because I believe it’s a key to Life. I believe it is the only way to move from being locked within a prison made of unanswered questions, to walking out into the world in love, as free men and women. Acceptance is a form of trust. Of faith, if you will, in the idea that we are each enrolled in a unique course of learning and growth and that our stories are what they are for a reason – even if we do not know what that reason is right now. 

We can allow our struggles and suffering to be our teachers, to make us soft where we need softening, and strong where we need to develop backbone, or we can spend a lifetime getting lost in the minutia and trying to answer the final why when it is not ours to know.

I am well aware of what it’s like to be tangled up inside of myself hunting for tiny pieces to the puzzle, hoping that just one more scrap will show up and fit just right so that I can finally make sense out of…everything. I also know how great it feels to let the questions go for a while and just set my eyes on the road before me. As I let go, I find clarity. As I find clarity, I learn peace. As I learn peace, I discover the heart of love. Within love there is freedom, and in freedom I can change.

Before the beautiful face of transformation, all of the unanswered questions fade away. My days may be lived with hands that are open, receiving and releasing without fear, and my hope will be found moment by new moment as I accept what has been, and allow the answers to come in their own season.