A year ago...

A year ago, I was sitting at my kitchen table with a friend, drinking tea while we talked about how we would react if someone close to us died.  We had both been emotionally wounded, and had turned to God for healing, but still I wondered, would I be able to mourn?  Would I even cry?  Is my heart mended enough to break again?

Within a few weeks, I stood at the coffin of a sweet young man, a close friend of my husband's, the best man at our wedding, a soldier, a dad, a son, a brother, a friend, and a suicide victim.  I held the mother of his children in my arms and wept with her.  There were no words.

Six weeks later, I stood in a hospital room, holding my mother's hand, watching her face, longing for her to be alive and knowing that she was gone.  I kissed her and felt my heart break into pieces. Leaving that room, leaving her there was the most painful thing that I have ever done in my life.

I have been in mourning ever since that conversation at my table. The death of a relationship as I watched a loved one's spirit shrivel and die from anger, bitterness and unforgiveness.  The careful, loving walk beside friends suffering the loss of their mother.  Wanting to do something, anything, and knowing full well that there is nothing to be done.  Just listening and crying.

I have even had moments when God has brought to mind events, losses from the past, things that I had never properly mourned, pain buried and denied to resurface another day.

So, the questions of that day have been answered. Yes, I cried.  A lot.  In grocery stores, restaurants, church,  history classes, and in my room, late at night when memories linger in the quiet darkness.  I have doubled over with pain so sharp it was physical.  I have thrown myself facedown on my bed and howled.  I have retreated to bathrooms, to my car, to my room to cry. 

Yes, my heart was healed enough to break.  The wonderful thing about God's healing touch is that He leaves the scars.  Wonderful?  How can that be wonderful?  The scars are beauty marks, the sign that we have been wounded, that we are healed, that we remember, and that our hearts are soft and sensitive to the pain of others.  Under God's care, I break, but I am never broken.  Joy comes in the morning.  And in the mourning.  Yes, laughter sometimes leads to more tears, but there is a sweetness in having had such amazing people in my life that their loss hurts so much.  I mourn because I have been blessed.  I mourn because I have loved. 

I would have it no other way.

In the midst of our pain, we will rise...

For the past few days, my heart has been heavy.  Two of my dear friends are mourning the death of their mother.  She was an amazing woman, and her strength and character live on in her children, and her children's children. 

I heard this song today, and thought of my friends. 

Isaiah 40:3 says, "those who hope in the Lord will renew their strength. They will soar on wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not be faint."

You are in my heart and prayers.

The Courage to Let Go

I think that one of the main reasons letting go is so difficult, either of a relationship, painful memories and experiences or people, is fear. Letting go is scary.  Even when holding on is tearing us apart, letting go can still be frightening.  We get used to the pain that we've lived with for so long, we know how to handle it, to manage it even if we can't get rid of it.  Letting go of the memories of a painful event or of a destructive relationship may leave us open to new challenges, new events, new relationships, and the potential for new pain.  And that is scary. 

Sometimes we use negative attachments and memories to remind us of the dangers we might face, to keep us "safe" by motivating us to avoid situations where we might get hurt again. 

The problem is that what we do to ourselves by not letting go is usually more damaging than anything we would risk by moving on.  We wall ourselves into individual little fortresses, determined to be careful, be safe, be protected.  We forget that the source of our pain is often locked into our fortress with us.  We may think that the pain that we feel today is caused by what someone did to us in the past, but whose voice is in our heads, retelling the story?  Who is repeating the insults, the hateful words, the lies, when the person who originally said these things isn't in the picture anymore?  If we were to listen, really listen, we would hear our own voices saying these things.  And we would be one step closer to understanding that the only way to stop those words is to...well...stop those words.  To let go.

It takes courage to let go and to begin again.  The truth is, we will be at risk of being hurt again.  Life hurts.  But if we allow the negative people, emotions, experiences and memories of our past to control our futures, we are not protecting ourselves from pain.  We are condemning ourselves to a life of sure pain, and resisting the hope, the possibility, the sheer wonder of new people, new emotions, new experiences and memories.  We wall ourselves off from joy, from laughter and love and the warmth of friendship and love. 

When Grace and I went to Burke camp in July, I had to leave the safety and aloneness of my room, my apartment, my life to enter into a world full of people and potential hurt.  I felt fragile, wounded, and fearful of being judged, rejected.  I was lonely, and I hated it, but people scared me. To be honest, sometimes they still do.  For some reason, I often expect everyone's first reaction to me to be negative, and am often surprised when the opposite happens. 

What I found, when I arrived at Burke camp, was love.  God's Spirit literally permeated the camp, the grounds, the people.  My frequent prayer lately is that God would give me the courage to be myself, and I was able to do that at camp.  I had so much fun, it was crazy.  I haven't laughed so much in a really long time.  I haven't given or received so many hugs, or enjoyed so many people in ages.  I received a new sense of who I am, in Christ, and I was encouraged.  It was glorious.

Letting go of the past leaves us open to love, and joy.  Just think, how wonderful it would be to laugh again, to be able to relax into a loving hug, to be comforted and cared for even as we care for and comfort others, to be silly and playful, to sing again, to dance, to welcome others into our world with freedom and courage, to be honest and real and to entertain the hope of wonderful things in our future.

My courage comes from God, who keeps picking me up again, and who uses the difficult experiences in my life to offer hope and love to others.  There is a line in a Steve Bell song that says, "It is Your (God's) reputation that makes me outrageously brave."   Courage is not a feeling, but a mental determination to over-ride what we are feeling and to move forward anyway.  James 1:4 - 6 says, "If any of you lacks wisdom, you should ask God, who gives generously to all without finding fault, and it will be given to you."  Courage doesn't make us stupid.  It links together with wisdom and God's guidance to move us forward in positive ways, to good places.  Yes, we may still find pain there.  Pain happens.  But having the courage to love, forgive, let go and ask for God's wisdom and guidance in the journey assures us a pretty awesome ride, even with the moments of pain. 


I find myself praying for courage often, to reach out, to love, to be who I know God is making me into, to live outside the prison bars of fear and condemnation.  Life is hard, yes, but it is also short.  There just isn't time to hold people and experiences at arms length until I can figure out if they are perfectly safe or not. 

I just don't have that kind of time.

Our Feelings...Real, but Reality?

I had a dream last night, in which I was telling someone (maybe myself?) that love is about actions, not feelings.  In the dream, I said, "How can we base our most important relationships on something as unpredictable as our feelings, which can be affected by lame things, like blisters on our feet?"

It reminded me of something that Grace said to me last week.  "Our feelings are a poor representation of reality"  It's true. Our feelings are real, but they do not always accurately represent reality. 

Someone said to me once, in essence, that when I did not change my point of view about certain issues to match his, I was disrespecting him.  I told the person that I meant no disrespect, but he said, "It FEELS that way."  And that was the end of the matter for him.  He was angry and resentful and hurt, and I was in an impossible situation. I couldn't, with any intergrity, change my opinion because I strongly believed what I thought.  I was speaking respectfully, and it was no more disrespectful for me to disagree with his opinion than it was for him to disagree with mine. I didn't feel disrespected by his stance that saw me as wrong. 

There was no point in discussing it anymore, as truth was no longer the issue.  I could claim, until I was exhausted from my efforts, that I was not disrespecting him, but he had chosen to believe that his feelings reflected truth, even though they didn't.  His feelings more likely reflected his insecurity, his anger issues, his pride...but not the truth.

This concept, that feelings don't necessarily represent reality, is one that Grace & I often have to remind ourselves and each other of.  I may feel alone, but am I really?  I may feel unloved, unappreciated, ugly or dumb, but is any of this actually true?  If we truly believe that God is in our lives, we are never alone, never unloved, never unappreciated, certainly not ugly or dumb. 

One of the biggest messages that Grace & I both took away from Burke camp, which is a church camp in Burke, N.Y that we go to every year in July, is the idea of practicing the constant presence of God in our lives.  He is with us always, in us forever, but are we aware of Him?  Practicing the Presence of God is a wonderful little work by Brother Lawrence, a simple, Catholic layman in a monastery in Paris, in the 1600's. His passion for God and steady dedication to continual prayer in the course of his daily tasks and duties are an inspiration that has reached through the centuries to grasp my daughter and I, inviting us to a more intimate, personal, constant relationship with God.  It is within this deeper relationship that we are finding freedom from the dominion of our emotions. 

The thing is, when we recognize that what we think our emotions are telling us may not be true, we are then free to find out what our feelings really are telling us.  Because they are telling us something.  If my friend from earlier has questioned himself rather than accuse me, he might have discovered what was at the root of his hurt and anger.  Such discoveries can result in growth, healing and closer, deeper relationships.  Instead, he eventually ended our relationship, certain that my refusal to be dominated, intimidated or guilted into being anything other than myself, indicated a disrespect for him that led him to some very disrespectful, shameful behavior.  Yes, our feelings are real.  They simply do not always reflect reality. The people in our lives are precious, too precious to lose to a lie. 

Just a thought.

Gratitude in the Midst of the Storm

It is so nice to be back in the blogosphere after a short hiatus (which sounds much better than after a vacation and two weeks of cyber-silence due to malfunctioning computers, don't you agree?)  So much has happened, in the physical, emotional and spiritual realms of my life, and to be honest, it's all sort of swirling around in my head like socks in a spin cycle.  Which usually means that if I try to tell what is going on inside of me, it will all make perfect sense to me and sound like utter gibberish to everyone else. Rather than trying to share the last few weeks worth of thoughts and experiences here, now, I think I'll just write about them gradually, as bits and pieces come flying out of the spin cycle onto the page.  Messy, yes.  But what is life without a bit of messiness?

One word that keeps arising from the whirlwind is "gratitude".  I am especially grateful for the people that God has placed in my life. For my family, and especially for my beautiful daughter, Grace, who turned 18 last week.  For my friends, who "get" me. And who love me anyway.  Some rough things are going on in my life, and I have been a bit worried about who I could trust with my story, my feelings, my heart.  Then came the glorious revelation that I am surrounded by people who are loving and trustworthy, people who want the best for Grace and I, who are supportive and encouraging.  It has not always been this way, but there is a purpose to everything, even if it is to expose darkness and to foster wisdom. 

I am grateful for my life, for the hope that my future holds, for people who remind me that God has a plan for my life, and that there is wonder, joy and peace in that plan.  I am also grateful for those who have taught me that wonder, joy and peace are available to me now, because they are part of the amazing Spirit of Jesus, and Jesus is mine, now.  Jesus is my joy. Jesus is my peace.  Jesus is my laughter, my stability, my hope, my life.

Life is so interesting, is it not?

Peace out.

Still letting go....

I guess the letting go stuff doesn't stop, huh? 

How to let go of someone, when their body still lives, their voice still rings in the air, their heart still beats?

How to let go of someone when you can see them, but they don't exist anymore?  When his eyes have become hard, his voice cold, and his gentleness, his love, his hope and joy and laughter and sweetness that I fell in love with are no more?

When unforgiveness reigns.  I know when it started. A community, a family that should have rejoiced in his good fortune, in his love, instead turned on him and used him as a means to an end. An ugly end.  It's not about you, they said.  But it was.  And he couldn't...didn't forgive.

Did they not suffer his loneliness with him?  Did they not pray with him, for a wife, for a family?  Yet, when God provided, they frowned and muttered and glared and rejected and he began his new life with the seeds of unforgiveness and bitterness in his heart.

And they grew. 

And he disappeared.

And still, I love.

I have lost more than a husband. I have lost a friend, a brother in the Lord, someone who loved our town and who shared his love with me, and who longed to make a difference here.

I don't know where he is anymore.  But this one thing I know.  Once in my heart, no one truly leaves. I choose to love, and to love always.  I choose forgiveness. I choose love.

The time is coming when I will no longer be his wife.  But I will always be his friend.  I promised. 

Someone asked me once, before we were married, how can you be sure?  I told him, I have made the choice.  I am sure of my choice.  I choose to love this man, no matter what.  That is mine to control.  And I keep to that choice.  I can be sure of nothing, but God's love for me, my love for God, and my choice to love another.  That is all I needed then. That is all I need now.

That love is what will keep me whole now. 


"Even though I walk
through the darkest valley,
I will fear no evil,
for You are with me; " Psalm 23:4

Memory & Mourning

Lately I have been finding myself often in a place of memory and mourning.  I have been in mourning for my mother for eight months, but as my heart is adjusting to the reality of her death, my mind is wandering towards other losses, ones that I am beginning to think were never properly mourned.  I have always understood and paid attention to the big losses, like death or the loss of my marriage.  I knew that these things needed to be mourned.  I have spent much of my adult life working through childhood experiences and have mourned losses that lived there as well.

These losses seem smaller, less life changing.  And yet, when I think of them, I find myself weeping.

A promise, made when I was 19, to a dear old man, that I was never able to keep.

A sudden realization, a sharp recognition of a "could-have-been" that left me doubled over in pain and regret.  I generally try to ignore "could-have-beens", but this one held a loss so great, it insisted on being mourned.

The soft look of love, lost, not because of death of the person, but because of death of love within the person. 

Beside these losses, the loss of my mother feels so...clean.  So normal.  I look at her picture and know that I will never, on this earth, see her face or hear her voice again. She was here and now she's not and the entire loss is wrapped in love and affection and holding her hand and telling her that it was okay to want to let go and her asking me, repeatedly, if I needed money, if I was okay, if I had what I needed. 

These other losses leave me stunned.  Broken. And then, I am left with a choice.  I can choose to see them, address them, mourn them, and let them go.  Or I can push them back into whatever heart-crevice they were hiding in and ignore them. Again.

So, I choose to mourn them.  It helps that I am kind of in mourning mode, anyway. Why stop now?  Who knows what God has planned for the space in my life that these things have occupied? 

One thing I am grateful for.  I am so glad that God has been teaching me about letting go.   It feels good to release these things into His hands.  I cannot change the past.  I cannot recoup my losses or make it all better. 

There is an awesome passage in the book of Joel - Joel 2:24 - 26


 “I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten —
the great locust and the young locust,
the other locusts and the locust swarm—
my great army that I sent among you.
You will have plenty to eat, until you are full,
and you will praise the name of the Lord your God,
who has worked wonders for you;
never again will my people be shamed. "

I will repay you for the years the locusts have eaten...I love that. 

Peace out.