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.

 

Bowling for Pigs

I’ve always considered myself a smart woman. My intelligence might be slightly above average. I graduated high school twenty-third out of five hundred eighty-nine. I wasn’t headed to MIT in the fall like the first twenty-two, but I led the parade of future blue-collar workers. I’m not bragging here. I just think that whatever life throws my way, eventually I’ll be up to the challenge

So, why am I so inept when it comes to taking care of farm animals?

After all, I raised my own kids and lots of people think that’s like being a zookeeper. In addition, I’ve owned three rescue dogs, one hamster, a love bird, some Japanese fighting fish, and I was stepmom to my son’s tarantula. I got skills. I got brains. I got hutzpah.

What I might be lacking is some common sense.

For six days this month, all the inmates at the Brady Rehabilitation Ranch were subjected to my inexperience as a farmhand. Again. Katy and Dan and the fam took off for their cabin to escape the heat and left me in charge of all the critters—six chickens, including two so reclusive I didn’t know they existed, one mama pig with six piglets, and two bossy sistersheep. They took their dog with them to the mountains so there’d be at least one survivor when they got home, and the desert tortoise was left to his own devices.

Lord, have mercy.

It was a circus from the get-go, right after twelve-year-old Jules, aka The Animal Whisperer, entrusted me with the schedule and ratios for feeding the flock, followed immediately by Katy’s whispered summary, “Just try to keep them alive,” and the telltale sound of their Suburban fleeing imminent disaster in a cloud of diesel fumes.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farms I am not. I don’t even compare to Ma Kettle. I’m more like Gilligan if The Minnow had run aground in a chicken coop. Feathers flying everywhere, poultry running for their lives, splintered wood covered in chicken doo doo. When I’m in charge of the henhouse, it’s one big . . . poop show.

It could drive a good Skipper to drink.

Case in point. “Toss a few alfalfa pellets over there to distract the sheep,” Jules instructed me, pointing to right field, “and then fill the entire scoop with more pellets and dump them into Maggie’s dish, there,” she continued, pointing down at about six o’clock on the other side of the pasture gate, “then . . . toss a quarter of a scoop of chicken scratch that way," she finished, gesturing toward the pitcher’s mound. This was gonna be a lot of math. And geometry. The pitcher’s mound looked pretty far away to me, and my arthritic throwing arm isn’t what it used to be. I wasn’t sure I could do much more than bunt the stuff.

Sure enough, it was a fiasco. I shook up that game plan every way I could imagine, but the sistersheep always raced in from the outfield, drop kicking the chickens in their mad scramble for a few dozen alfalfa pellets, followed by knocking the piglets on their kiesters. And it hurts my heart to say this in public, but Maggie’s mothering instincts are nothing to write home about. She was just as selfish at the dinner table as everybody else and left her little piglets out in left field to fend for themselves. One night while I was entertaining neighbors at my house, I spotted the sistersheep headbutting those poor little piglets over a few pieces of alfalfa in the pasture. The dark-haired youngsters rolled across the fairway with so much momentum they looked like bowling balls flying down a green alley. I jumped up from my chair, muttering forgivable things, ready to give those wooly bullies a piece of my mind, when one of my visitors stopped me midstride.

“Ummmmm,” he began, as his wife looked at me with alarm. “Ya gotta let the animals work it out for themselves.” I’m pretty sure that’s the same thing Napoleon said at Waterloo, but I sat down anyway and played another domino. What the heck, I thought. I fed them like Jules asked me to and kept them alive like Katy suggested. Nobody told me to break up fights. What else can you expect from a city girl?

My guests headed home soon after and I began to clean up the kitchen. Tossing some food scraps and a couple of cracked eggs into a large bowl, I found a pint of moldy strawberries in the fridge, too, and decided to throw everything over my patio fence out to the animals. Not that they deserved any treats, but it saved space in my trash can. The eggs had barely splattered on the ground when all hell broke loose. It was like they knew I was coming, and they were waiting for me. Creepy. The chickens, racing on skinny legs and looking like their arms were tied behind their backs, ran like drunken sailors across the pasture, headed straight for disappointment. I’m pretty sure chickens don’t eat eggs. By the time I’d lobbed red pepper remnants and onion skins over the no-climb fencing, the roly poly piglets arrived with both the sistersheep hot on their tails. Maggie pulled up the rear.

I guess nothing excites a bunch of freeloaders more than rotten food.

I had the porch light on, but the rest of the pasture was in pitch darkness. I’d given them all my scraps except for the strawberries. Since the whole pint was ruined, I thought it’d be less messy if I simply held the plastic clamshell upside down over the fence and let gravity empty it out. But gravity took the whole thing out of my hands and the entire container with its contents landed at the feet of a crazed crowd. Holy.Moly. Now I know where the inspiration for that painting of stacked farm animals came from—it was a feeding frenzy on the south side of somebody else’s pasture. A riot broke out on the other side of my patio fence as the inmates mutinied there over a bunch of gnarly berries. Now Maggie was headbutting her own piglets who rolled between the feet of the sheep like a bunch of croquet balls through wooly wickets. The chickens staged a counterattack, pecking everything in sight including sheep feet, and no one seemed to notice that they’d devoured all of those stupid strawberries and were now fighting over an empty, plastic clamshell.

All I could think of was Katy’s last words to me. “Just try to keep them alive.” I didn’t know if chickens can chew plastic and stay alive. Or if sheep eat trash like goats do, or if pigs are the equivalent of grazing garbage cans, but if any jagged piece of that container made it into their digestive tracts, I was pretty sure Jules was gonna fire me.

“Geeze Louise,” I muttered in frustration, quickly reviewing my options.  I’d have to walk all the way down to the double gates, open that tight chain in the dark, then double back up the pasture in the pitch blackness, make my way through a herd of filthy animals to retrieve a defiled clam shell covered in pig snot and chicken slobber if I couldn’t figure this out. Gross. Double gross. There was no way I was gonna put my life at risk like that. I was not going to die trampled to death by pigs in a field of chicken poop. I had my dignity, after all.

My mind racing, I ran into the house and retrieved the only thing I could think of—my handy dandy grabber from Amazon. If I hurried, maybe I could stab it through the mesh opening in the fence, grab the edge of the clamshell, and lift it up above the animals’ heads and over the fence to safety. But by the time I returned, they’d wrestled the filthy thing out of my reach. Back to the house I ran. This time, I seized my long-handled broom and hurried outside with it. The criminals were still struggling with the empty strawberry container, slowly edging it further and further away from my fence.

With seconds to spare, I shoved the handle of the broom through the open mesh, pinned the clamshell to the ground and held on for dear life. It was like hanging on to a slab of meat in a river boiling with pirhanas as the wild animals fought for control of the desecrated plastic. But I had more to lose than they did if I didn’t regain control of this situation—I’d have to explain why the animals died of PVC poisoning to the Bradys when they got home. Finally, after a tense couple of seconds, Maggie lost interest and she and her dizzy brood all wandered off, the chickens got distracted by random bug vibrations, and the snooty sistersheep gave me a bleat of contempt and disappeared. I didn’t care. I scooched the container back toward my fence, retrieved it with the grabbers, and brought the clamshell over for the win.

It was disgusting. All I had to show for my expertise and amazing courage was a snot-covered clam shell painted muddy brown with animal drool and dirt. And a filthy grabber that I once used to pull clean clothes out of the washing machine. I wasn’t even sure it could be salvaged after the way I’d humiliated it. Probably I’d just have to burn it at the stake.

Holding the plastic hostage at arm’s length, I scooped the broom up off the patio, and cradled the sacrificial grabber under my arm while I headed back inside. I shoved the clamshell deep inside the garbage can and washed my hands. Repeatedly.

Those pigs. I used to think a lot of Maggie, but she had really let me down this time. Drying my hands on a towel, I leaned back against the counter, exhausted and disheartened. I didn’t know when I’d ever been so disillusioned by a pig before.

Staring off into space, I blew out a breath.

“I’m so disappointed in Maggie,” I said, choking out the words. "I'm not sure I’ll ever enjoy eating sausage again.”

With thanks to Bill Harrison for permission to use his hilarious photo seen above. The original can be viewed at this link: I went bowling - everyone was impressed | I thought this was… | Flickr

Becoming Human

I never knew.

I never knew the depth of the pain of losing someone you adore. Grief was a casual visitor in my life, never allowed past the front door, always kept at arm’s length. I knew Grief in other settings, whenever Life handed out failure, disappointment, unkindness, or rejection. But compared to how well I know Grief now, he was no more than background noise in a room filled with other ambiguous voices.

Now Grief has his own room and overflows every trash can in my house with used Kleenex. He’s a sloppy guest.

I didn’t know the complexity of my own humanity until Rob died. How I hate reading those words, Rob died. Here are more that I hate reading—when Rob died, part of me died, too. That makes some people recoil, wanting to rush to the bleeding wound and apply a tourniquet. But tourniquets kill, did you know that? Rob told me that once. You apply pressure. You don’t shut off the flow of blood to other healthy cells or they’ll die, too.

Grief is the pressure. Tourniquets shut down emotions.

I knew I was born a human, but somewhere along the way, as I spent literally years homesteading a pew, I adopted an Us and Them philosophy. I’m not proud of this. It’s humbling to even write that here and certainly it will offend some. It offends me, too. I lived a secluded life surrounded by people of the same faith as mine, secure in my salvation, unsure of how to share it or even interact with Them. I hoped that as I drove to and from my pew throughout the week that my good example would rub off and the curious would follow me and discover their own pew.

I even thought that knowing God as intimately as I did would keep me insulated from suffering. I had my own versions of sorrow, of course, consigned to the ups and downs of marriage, child rearing, family dynamics, financial pressures, and conflicts with others. This seemed to me to be enough suffering to qualify me as having lived a human life on planet earth. I was sure God agreed. I learned it from my pew.

I thought being human was bad. After all, Jesus came to save us from our sins and give us a new life. I became born again—raised to walk in newness of life, as the pastor said when he lifted my soggy self from the baptismal waters. I was a new creation. The old was gone, the new had come.

See where the confusion came from? What I forgot, and maybe what wasn’t emphasized to that audience of pews, is that Jesus came in the flesh. He set aside His deity and became human. A man of sorrows. Tempted in every way as we are, yet without sin. He came to be a suffering servant. To be human is to experience suffering.

In my defense, because I’ve lived my entire life trying to protect myself when no one else would, I’ve always sought safety. It was my number one priority. I fell in love with Rob because he made me feel safe. He was the most patient person I’d ever met, and I felt safe in his love for me until the end of his life. And then I didn’t feel safe anymore. I felt lost. Abandoned. Confused. Angry. Alone. Shocked. Misunderstood. All the things, all at once, over and over and over again.

I didn’t know who I was anymore. Was I still his wife? Was I still a McLeod now that my connection to his identity was gone? This week I found out Target canceled my Redcard, even though I applied for it on my own, because they learned that Rob died. Even they believe I am nothing without my husband here. It’s not just the relics of a misogynistic society that keep me feeling untethered. It is the literal truth that Rob and I were one, just as God said we would be.

I lost half of me the morning Rob died, and the other half of me is still on life support.

This is grief. This is suffering. This is how people live in loss, but most of the time have no way of telling you what it looks like or how it feels. But on the other side of the pew, in a world of turmoil and hatred, jealousy and greed, innocent people pay the price for being human and they know what it means to suffer. Rob knew that. He saw it firsthand. He spent his life in a career field that set him smack in the middle of other people’s worst nightmares. He rarely told me about any of it. He didn’t want me to worry. He wanted me to feel safe.

Now I live in my own nightmare. I wish he was here to comfort me.

Maybe you’re wondering what the point is. I understand. I’m searching for the right words at your expense. I believed Rob and I would live to the end of both our very old lives together, kick off at the same time because I wanted it that way, and arrive in heaven hand in hand. And if that didn’t work out, I was sure I’d go first because Rob was healthier than me and I didn’t want to suffer his loss. I am absolutely stunned that I have been left here without him.

That’s what I wanted to say. The ongoing hurt of loving and missing my love and my life is unlike any pain I have ever before experienced. Believing, and constantly being told by other pew warmers, that God would have to heal Rob if I believed it hard enough created a slough of confusion in my life that no one should ever have to endure. It wasn’t true. It made this loss harder. God is not a genie. And I am not above being human.

I was not immune to the suffering of my humanity simply because I was good at warming a pew. Or because I have belonged to Jesus since I was nine years old. Or because I have tried to let Jesus live through me. Stayed as far away from danger as I could get. Loved my family and friends. All the things. “In this world you will have trouble,” Jesus said. No matter how hard you try to avoid it. He didn’t mince words much. I didn’t want to believe it could happen to me, becoming a widow. But it did.

There’s no shame in being human. Now I know how it feels.

 

 ^“I assure you, most solemnly I tell you, that you shall weep and grieve . . . You will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will be turned into joy . . . Take courage. I have overcome the world for you.”

 John 16:20, 33 Amplified

I Know

 

I basked in you;

I loved you, helplessly, with a boundless tongue-tied love.
And death doesn't prevent me from loving you.
Besides,
in my opinion you aren't dead.
(I know dead people, and you are not dead.)
​
― Franz Wright, Walking to Martha's Vineyard

 

 

I know dead people. And you are not dead.

 

The dead people I know look like the living, but the flame is gone from their hollow, disillusioned eyes.

Even as you lay on your deathbed, gaunt, weak, your hair grown out, face unshaven,

So long was your personal care relegated to a dusty drawer somewhere

That I barely recognized the man I’d kissed goodbye only four weeks earlier,

Still, sunken though they were, your searching eyes found me.

You were still there, and you knew me.

Though dying, your strong spirit lived on.

I know dead people. And you are not dead.

 

I knew your hand.

The one I held for hours while I sat in that hospital room chair, reaching beneath the metal bars that kept you from me until they said I could come say goodbye.

And I took your hand in mine, the way you took mine at that long ago altar.

The one I’d placed a turquoise wedding band on all those years ago.

That one.

I stroked that hand where it lay alongside your broken body, interlaced my fingers with yours for the last time,

Doing what I had to do.

I had to let you go. It’s what you asked for.

It’s not what I asked for.

Now and then the faintest squeeze spoke your love to me in the stillness where your voice went silent.

You were not dead, though your body lay dying.

I know dead people. And you are not dead.

 

Your last breath carried you away from me. From all of us. I wasn’t there, ill as I remained.

They tell me when the dying are ready to leave,

They often wait until a loved one steps away.

Like I did.

Even in your last breath, you were thinking of me.

I was thinking of you.

I still am.

Waiting.

Alert to the feel of your spirit near mine,

The gentle touch of your love on my heart,

Leaving ripples like a breeze on the water.

Only your body died.

You live on.

I know dead people.

And you are not dead.

Megan Devine, author of the book on grief, "It's Okay That You're Not Okay", sends writing prompts to the alumni of her writing courses on dealing with grief. This is the result of my response to one of her prompts.

Taking Back the Land

Uprooted, against its will, without explanation. It used to be a vibrant lawn, nurtured by expansive sunlight, generously watered by irrigation. Until the backhoe came, killing every healthy blade, piling it all in a heap at the edge of the fencing, and leaving it there with the typical sign, “Free Dirt.”

They had no choice. Change was coming. Change had already arrived.

Heavy trucks rolled across the dusty remains, adding insult to injury. Then, like the aftermath of an uncoordinated parade, hundreds of footprints packed down the unruly dirt. Soon, expansive windows in a new house—whose build was the cause for all this demolition—stared out blankly at a wide expanse of brown nothingness.

So much for curb appeal.

It looked as though nothing would ever grow there again. She could relate to the injury suffered by the land, its only crime being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She pondered replacing the yard with a carpet of fake grass to bring color back again, but quickly ditched the idea. It seemed like the equivalent of stretching a giant green Band-Aid over the wound. How about xeriscape? She could just swap out a luxurious lawn for a mass of heavy, unimaginative gravel. Or maybe a fence would hide the annihilation. That wouldn’t change the view from the inside, though. The earth was damaged. There was no getting around this bare fact. She saw it every time she sat at the desk and looked outside at the Desolation of Smaug. 

This was her fault. In an organic way, it felt like her life.

What this injury called for made her let out a long, deep sigh. The inevitable answer to all of life’s dilemmas. As boring as the brown earth outside her window.

Time.

It was going to take some time. And patience. She'd just have to wait. Day after day, week after week. it was like watching . . . grass grow.

“It’ll come back, Mom,” her gifted gardener assured her. “See the edge of the irrigation flow?”  A dark outline from the previous day’s flooding marked the boundaries of a someday front yard. “Just as soon as it starts getting hot, the Bermuda will take over. It always does.”

Just as soon as it gets hot. So weird. When she stood outside in summer, she thought she'd self-combust. When Bermuda feels the heat, it resurrects. Slowly creeping along, the determined seeds hidden in the bulldozed dirt would germinate—die—only to come back to life again. The march of green was unstoppable, a showy display of survival in catastrophe's void.

Six weeks later as she sat at her desk and stared once more through the huge window, she realized with surprise that her daughter had been right. No longer did the front yard resemble the moon’s surface. As summer did what summer does, the Bermuda responded like an army. Outfitted in green fatigues, the troops spread out across two-thirds of the once barren landscape, determined to take back stolen territory. It had already encircled another survivor—an Ash tree once diseased and cut down, its stump exploded now with dozens of healthy shoots, each vying to replace the life that once was.

The life that once was.

An annihilated tree in the throes of rebirth. A devastated lawn reclaiming its identity. A shattered heart watching in fascination from her front row seat at the window, waiting for hope to restore her soul. 

You can’t stop life. The landscape may change, but immortal seeds remain - there beneath the surface, anxious to be revealed and get back to the business of living. You will live again, too, she bravely reminds herself. Let your tears soften the grains of grief. The life within will surface and take over. It always does.  

She knows the rest.  

It’s just going to take some time.

With thanks to SoulRider.222 for permission to use the terrific photo seen above. The original can be viewed by following this link: green shadow army | 3/13/10. Canon Rebel XTi. Canon EF-S. Ca… | Flickr

Here's To You

Animal Planet has nothing on the episodes I watch daily right outside my back fence. So far this morning I’ve binge watched Sneaky Sheep, Chicken Chatter, and Three More Little Piggies, the Sequel. I’m learning a lot from these episodes.

• ·         Piglets running across an open pasture are the cutest things I’ve ever seen.
• ·         If Bert jumped off the roof, Ernie would,too.
• ·         When the dinner bell rings, manners fly out the window. 
• ·         Now I know why Jesus compared people to sheep.

Every time I watch this channel, I am astonished by the way farm creatures treat each other. Take Sara and Esther, for example. I couldn’t keep them straight or even remember their names until this morning when Jules came out to the gate with breakfast for everyone and pointed out the differences between the two. Sara is lean and mean. She and her sister are both breeds without any sheepy fluff. They always look like they’ve recently been sheared, though Esther’s back is covered with a shallow layer of fleece, presumably to protect her fair skin. I think that’s why Sara is so grumpy—too many sunburns.

Once Jules pointed out the differences between the girls, it all made sense. Sara and Esther are Bible names given appropriately to the two sheepish sisters. For example, as soon as Jules sent a scoop full of alfalfa chunks sailing into the air over the double gate, mayhem exploded among the inhabitants on the other side like a Black Friday sale at the mall. It was everyone for themselves, especially Sara, the bossy one, behaving just like Abraham's wife. 

I’m telling you, she was out of control. Acting like she hadn’t eaten in a month, she butted into the front of the line, sending chickens flying and scrambling the little piglets. They weren’t any threat to her hungry belly. The poor little kids don’t even know how to chew alfalfa yet. Jules chided Sara's bad behavior, but after watching for a minute, she told her little flock, “I’ll be right back,” and headed off to do some other nice deed for them. Esther stood back from the free-for-all and waited patiently, looking like the exiled queen she's named for. But Sara? She pushed her nosy nose up to the gate and bellowed after Jules. Now, I don’t speak sheep, and I’ve noticed that Sara’s tone of voice is always one note, but if you ask me, she was pretty snippy there for a minute.

Self-centered. Animals only share as long as their mouths are full.

You know what else I was thinking about? Farm animals don’t have jobs. They don’t clean up after themselves. They don’t plant anything on purpose. If seeded food scraps make it through their digestive systems, you might find a volunteer tomato plant sprouting in the middle of the pasture, but believe me, all the credit goes to the tomato. After a journey like that, they deserve applause just for surviving.

The only job these critters have is one of my personal favorites. Eating. And they’re good at it. Their sole purpose is to eat and grow. That’s it. And sleep in between. I’ve been sitting here for over an hour watching the show and if they’re not sleeping, this cast of characters is eating. Grazing on grass, pecking at bugs, slurping from the watering trough, jumping up to grab leaves from low hanging branches, nursing on their mama. All they do is eat. It’s all they know how to do besides fight each other in order to eat more. And after all the energy they expend finding bugs or just the right blade of grass, they lie down to rest and digest. When they get up, the whole cycle begins again.

They’re not worried about the stock market. They don’t care who’s running the country. They never get annoyed by other drivers. They don't give a thought to what anyone thinks of them. They can’t even read. They never miss out on sleep. They’re not consumed by guilt. Spiritual questions don’t steal their joy. They feel safe in the pasture provided for them and live a life of contentment being themselves.

And eating.

Eating grass is their one and only job, which keeps the pasture looking mowed which saves the family from having to bring in a tractor which saves on gas and oil and sweat. That’s pretty much all they’re contributing to the economy here at the Brady farm. The only thing that will end up on our breakfast plates are donated eggs. No one is going to become a sausage link or a leg of lamb around here. These are beloved pets, at least to Jules, and as long as they do the one thing that comes naturally to them, they can live here without expectations or fear of failure.

So, this morning, as the credits roll on this adventure series and the chickens cozy up to the fence to see if I’m hiding any pellets in my pockets, I lean back in my chair and consider what I’ve learned by watching this scriptless documentary.

• ·         I make my life a lot harder than it should be.
• ·         I am sometimes my own worst enemy. I don’t even need another sheep to headbutt me—I can do it to myself.
• ·         It’s a waste of energy to wonder if people watch my every move or criticize how I live life.
• ·         I don’t have to work at anything to deserve the good things God gives me.
• ·         I only need to be the Eula that He created me to be. Not anyone else’s version, including my own.
• ·         If I eat and digest and absorb the good stuff, I might accidently leave something good behind.
• ·         All I really need to do is eat.

 

Time for a donut.