Rock Life

I could hear her take a breath on the other end of the line. A pause. “What we’re doing is really hard, Mom,” she said. It is. I couldn’t say anything because my heart was in my throat again. Validation. No excuses or cheerleading or minimizing or avoiding. This is pain. I didn’t know this is how it goes until it happened to me. To us.

After a few minutes, we talked about last night’s storm - the one that missed us - and joked that it might rain here eventually. My best guess was sometime around Thanksgiving, sporadic as summer showers are here in the desert. We hung up. I went around closing windows and had put on my pajamas when a change in background sounds grabbed my attention.

Was that rain? Or just my imagination? Because sometimes when the air conditioner kicks on it sounds like . . . nope. It never sounds like thunder.

I walked into my bedroom, raised the blinds, and sat down in my chair across the room to watch the show. Lightning lit up the night sky, showcasing the beating the massive ash tree was taking from the monsoon’s onslaught. Violent winds whipped the branches, forcing them to twist and bend close to the ground in obedience to the storm’s demand. I began to pray that none of the old growth treasures in Katy’s backyard would be damaged by the storm. I remembered what happened to a neighbor’s elm a year ago during a similar onslaught. I didn’t want to see everyone’s favorite here pulled up by its roots and laid out across the back pasture.

Torrential rain pounded heavily against my huge bedroom window, but this house, this new home where I've lived for three months, was built strong and sturdy. It took the punishing wind in stride, allowing the storm’s fury to lash out relentlessly without giving up any ground. It reminded me of something I’d heard once, or maybe a thousand times, about another storm. How the rain fell, and the floods and torrents came, and the winds blew and slammed against another house in a similar storm. Yet that house did not fall because it had been built upon a rock.

I got it, but what about my questions? There are so many days when my feet seem to be sinking in quicksand that I have to wonder if my “house,” my life, can weather this terrible storm that’s overtaken me, pummeling my heart and those of my children, for the last year and a half. Every day I face multiple reminders of the truth my mind and my heart still haven't fully grasped. I carry the weight of it for hours, all day long, trudging through every normal routine with the energy of a sloth, and when I finally force myself to go to bed alone sleep is restless. I wake up exhausted, only to start all over again.

That just doesn’t feel like rock life to me.

So, I questioned the story of the house. I questioned the Author of the story. He’s used to that by now. And it doesn’t rock His world, so to speak.

“Are you sure, Lord?” I sighed. I knew those embedded verses floated to the surface at His command. They sure weren’t my idea. “What if I can’t keep standing against these winds? You hear them pounding me. You see me catch my breath and turn my head in public, trying to push the image of him to the back of my mind so no one feels uncomfortable or, worse, feels sorry for me when my eyes overflow with tears. You know it would be easier for me to resign from humanity and stay locked up in my house than to risk breaking down in public.

“I’m trying to rebuild my life without him beside me, not because I want to but because I have no other choice. What if I fall? What if I’m not stronger than I seem and braver than I believe and smarter than I think? What then? WHAT IF THIS STORM IS THE ONE THAT TAKES ME OUT?”

There wasn’t even a delay in the answer. There was no condemnation for the way I phrased it, either. There was, as there always is, supreme confidence and complete acceptance. And love. All enveloping love and understanding.

“God is within her, she will not fall.” Short and sweet and to the point, as usual, the reply came. There it is. This thing we’re doing is really hard. It won’t be over in a year. Not in two years. Or three. For all I know, it will take the rest of my life to grieve him and us. I don’t know. I’ve never been here before. I hardly know anyone else who has either. As Katy and Lee and I have often reminded each other, we don't know what we're doing.

All I can say for sure is that it’s hard. I miss him. Desperately. It makes me doubt what I’m made of. It makes me think I’m not “performing” well. I feel fragile and lost sometimes. I’m tired all the time. My family has had to circle the wagons while we take care of ourselves and each other. We used to run on autopilot, managing life with one arm tied behind our backs. Now it takes every ounce of focus just to put one foot in front of the other. Trying to survive is a full-time job.

Does it look like I’m falling? Yes, sometimes. Am I bent to the ground in sorrow? You bet. Will I break in this storm? I’m already broken. Am I built on the Rock? It’s the only thing I know for sure in a world that has taken away the security I once had.

When the storms come, I am His.
When the sun shines, I am still His.
Nothing depends on me.
Everything depends on Him.
That’s why he’s the Rock.
And I’m not.

Storms are scary, though. I’m afraid a lot. This one has dug in like a cut-off low and the waters are rising. Riding out this storm is harder than it looks, takes longer than you’d think, and is lonelier than you’d believe. How do I know I will come out on the other side in one piece?

Because God is within her. She will not fall. **

Fine. Bring me another umbrella. 

 

* And the storm came.  And the rain fell, and the floods and torrents came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had been founded on the rock. Matthew 7:25       **God is within her, she will not fall. Ps. 46:5   

Angel Story

It was an old blue Toyota that once belonged to his father. The two men loved that rusty piece of antique machinery. Lee paid so much money to repair it and turn it into a rock climber that he later told me, “I could have had a brand-new Corolla with its very own key fob for all I’ve spent on these wheels.” True. I felt kind of guilty there since it was my idea that he buy back the Landcruiser which Rob had driven for so many years before he’d sold it. And then I got over it. Even with its new Chevrolet engine and expanded, wide wheelbase, that faded blue truck with its original Toyota body still didn’t have air conditioning or enough seat belts or power anything. Lee dubbed the hybrid version they’d come up with “The Toy-let.” It was a man’s truck inside and out and that’s the reason they loved it. It’s also the reason I seldom rode in it.

“I want you to tell me about that afternoon in the mountains,” I told Lee today as we caught up by phone. “The day the steering gave out on the Landcruiser.”

Instantly, Lee was back behind the wheel of his first vehicle, careening out of control at sixty miles an hour down the last mountain grade before he hit desert flatlands--literally. With him rode two of his best friends, one in the passenger seat in the front, the other in the boxy rear without a safety belt.

“I told them to brace themselves,” he said, remembering the terrifying experience. “A pin came out of the steering column on the last steep grade coming down off the Mogollon Rim. I tried to use the brakes, but I had no control over the wheels.” The college age boys hung on in terror, unable to do anything as the Toyota gained speed, its wheels unresponsive to Lee’s frantic efforts to straighten out. With no one able to steer it, the truck and its passengers were headed for a deep ravine in the middle of nowhere in the Arizona heat.

“A curb suddenly appeared right before we went off the road,” Lee remembered, telling his story as if it happened yesterday. “In the middle of the desert, our right front wheel clipped a solitary curb, careened off it, and the impact sent us across two lanes to the other side of the divided highway.”

“You coasted to a stop on the side of the road then?” I asked.

“Yep. For a minute, we just sat there, trying to believe what had happened. That’s when another truck pulled in behind us. There hadn’t been anyone around for miles, we crash into a curb and come to a stop on the side of the highway, and suddenly there’s this old pickup rolling to a stop a few yards back of us. It was loaded up with a bunch of junk covered by a big tarp and the guy told me he and his family were moving to California, taking all the back roads on their way. This was a weird back road to drive in a truck like that. It looked like it was straight out of The Grapes of Wrath. The driver told me he’d run out of gas.”

He ran out of gas at exactly the same place where Lee’s truck had gone rogue.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“We siphoned some gas from my tank and put it in his truck.”

“Oh,” I said. “I thought you had an extra can with you. But if you had to siphon it, what did you use to get it out?”

“He had a piece of garden hose in that pile of junk in the pickup bed. And he dug around in there for a while, found a screw, crawled up under the Landcruiser and used it to tighten down the steering mechanism. He said it’d hold until I got home and was sure I could drive it. Dad arrived after the guy left and followed us home, but the man was right. I never broke down and we made it back.”

That’s when I asked the hard question. Right after I reviewed the crazy story he’d just told me.

The boys had spent a weekend camping in the mountains and trying out the rock-climbing features of Lee’s truck. They were headed home and nearly made it to the flatlands off the curvy mountain grade when a pin fell out of the steering system, making it impossible for Lee to straighten out the wheels and avoid driving off into a ravine at sixty miles per hour. Only two of the three passengers had seatbelts. There was tragedy in the making in the desert that afternoon when a piece of curbing suddenly appeared at exactly the right place to re-direct an out-of-control Landcruiser away from the ravine and back onto the straightaway so Lee’s braking could stop his vehicle. Then a stranger rolls in right behind them in his Grapes of Wrath truck with the know-how to make a screw work in place of a pin in an antique Toyota, whips out a length of hose and siphons gasoline from the Landcruiser into his own vehicle, and goes on his merry way. To California. In the middle of a hot September day in Arizona’s desert.

I took a deep breath and forged ahead. “So . . . did you think the guy in the Grapes of Wrath truck might have been an angel?”

“That’s exactly what we thought,” he answered. “As soon as the adrenalin calmed and we could talk about it, we were all convinced the guy was an angel.”

It still makes me break out in a cold sweat when I think how very differently that day could have turned out. It was an impossible situation, and they knew it. They were bracing for the worst, holding on for dear life with no options available to stop the inevitable.

But then a curb appeared.

Followed by a beat-up truck and a driver with an unlikely story.

And a screw in place of a pin that held the steering together all the way back from the desert to the city.

I mean, it could have been a coincidence. All those miraculous things that came together at exactly the right moment and saved the lives of three young men. It could have been. Except later we drove back to the scene of the crime, rode up and down that highway for miles, and we never found that cement curb—which had no reason to be there in the first place since there wasn’t another building in sight for fifty miles in any direction.

I don’t know about you, but in a world where things are desperately trying to go to hell in a hand basket, it gives me more hope than I can describe to know we have armies of angels on our side all the time.

Even before we ask, even if there’s no time to ask for help, God’s messengers are watching, ready to intervene. “What role, then, do the angels have? The angels are spirit-messengers sent by God to serve those who are going to be saved. . . I make my angels swift winds, and my ministers fiery flames.” *

And, sometimes, they even drive old pickup trucks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Hebrews 1:14 and 1:7, Amplified Bible

With thanks to SoulRider.222 for permission to use this photo of the Toy-let's twin, but with a lot less rust. The original photo can be viewed by following this link: Toyota Land Cruiser | May 2011. While riding. Nikon Coolpix … | Flickr

Honesty

 

Where did the hawks go?

Where’d the hawks go, Papa?

 

Why?

Why did I have to lose everything?

 

 

Didn’t I serve you and your church well enough?

 

 

 

 

 

Didn’t I spend my life raising my children with integrity and devotion?

 

 

 

 

 

Didn’t I love my husband with loyalty and commitment?

 

 

Where did the hawks go? 

Papa?

Another Day At The Beach

The opposite of “glory” is “shame.” 

I looked up the definition for glory today. I’ve been told that writing is my glory, but I didn’t understand. I’ve only ever heard glory attributed to God, not to us - praise, worship, and thanksgiving offered to a deity. But that's the third meaning. The first speaks of notable achievements. The second to beauty or fame.

Isaiah 42:8 tells us God will not share his glory with another.

John 17:22 says Jesus has given to us the glory God gave to Him.

Psalm 3:3 reads, “Thou, oh Lord, art a shield about me, you’re my glory and the lifter of my head.” I want to understand what glory is, so I'll know how it gives honor to my writing. And because of that picture I had to buy. 

And because shame tells me I'm not grieving right.

I feel so down, Lord. It seems that every day the raw real of what has happened sinks a little more into my consciousness. I guess it’s because of what I’ve been told - that my brain is both protecting me from the head-on knowledge of Rob’s death while at the same time slowly re-wiring itself to accept the truth. This is a hard one to explain to those who’ve never been here. But I’ll try.

Every morning I wake up and miss his arms reaching for me. I remember them clearly. Forty-four years makes an indelible impression in my psyche. I remember his hands and his arms and his eyes so clearly, it’s almost like I can see him.

But I can’t. Because he’s not here. And he will never be here again.

That’s a pretty difficult fact to face, even after sixteen months of staring at it.

Sometimes I’m paralyzed lying in my bed, knowing I’ll feel better if I can simply stand up and move. But it’s not simple. I’m frozen. It’s almost as though I have to learn to walk again. Because it’s just like that. Only I have to learn to live again.

So, I get up. Because the call of nature is insistent. I open a blind letting sunshine stream in, setting serotonin buzzing in my body. This is good. Drugs without a rap sheet. I shower. Or dress. Make my bed. Apply some makeup. Eat some food and drink some water. All the things. Counting up the hours of sleep, I congratulate myself on fighting for another eight and winning.

The throbbing ache of sorrow softens now. Rest and movement supply some normalcy that translates into hope. Perhaps if I keep doing this every day, someday I’ll get up the way I used to, without drowning in my tears, and look forward to a new day. Someday. It was our word. Not anymore. A new dictionary is in play.

While the sun rules in ascension, my spirits rise with it. But as afternoon surrenders to incoming shadows, weariness replaces courage and I falter. Who knows why. There are so many things waiting to ambush my heart. A photo on my phone. A phrase he used to say, now carelessly repeated by me. A sudden memory. A longing while watching a movie. The smell of coffee. The list is endless, the surprises merciless.

For the rest of the day as fatigue stages a coup, waves of grief rush in, knocking me to my knees the way waves steal my footing in the sand. They rush out again, leaving me breathless and hopeful that the retreat is permanent. But it’s not. Only with the renewal of another battle fighting for eight hours of rest will I find the energy needed to face another day at the beach.

There is a rhythm to life. There is a rhythm in grief. I’ve been told that grief never leaves, but it changes. Perhaps I’m seeing that here, almost halfway through my second year without Rob. It must be painful for others to watch, chewing their fingernails the way he did as they root for me to surface again from these dark waters. And again. And again.

And again.

Grief does the work of re-orienting my brain until the new normal is one where Rob and I once lived in unison, but now I live alone. Sometimes I still can’t believe he’s gone. I keep expecting him to come around the corner. I long for him to come around the corner. I ache for him to come around the corner.

I will never see him come around the corner. My brain is slowly, painfully, one atom at a time, reframing the way I see the world—a world without Rob McLeod in it.

This is not healing. There is no healing when your heart has been shattered. This is not moving on. This is just my story. And ours. The price of deep love.

I wish I could say that I will be myself again. I don’t think that’s true. You don’t just “get over” a loss this big. Keep breathing, yes. Laugh again, yes. Get over it? No. Learn to carry what cannot be fixed, yes.

So, that picture I bought. A continuous-line drawing of a woman’s silhouette, hugging her knees, her face bent to the ground. There’s no sense of glory there. She hugs her beauty to herself, hiding her face from the audience, frozen as if in shame. 

But her Deliverer comes. The lifter of her head. The One Who shields her from accusation and carries her when she can’t walk. The One Who feels her grief and saves her tears. He will lift her head. He will restore her glory. He will even reunite her Someday with her love.

There is no shame in the glory God gives.

It’s just the opposite.