Spreading a Little Sunshine

It is almost the end of two arduous weeks with an even more arduous one looming ahead. The heat wave undulating over the earth has left me feeling like I have been through a pasta maker. Picture Flat Stanley's grandmother. My heart and soul feel even flatter. I know friends, faithful friends, far and near are praying for me.

I messaged a friend about the prayers going up and how I needed to hear from God. Even as we typed back and forth, a note was landing in my email inbox. A note from a stranger. I'll tell you more about that note later. I have to percolate on it a while longer.

As I was absorbing the message from the stranger, I saw a friend's name pop up on my sidebar. Oh! She had a new blog post up on her site, Journeying Sue. I hit on it faster than a fly on watermelon at a picnic. 

A friend had nominated her for a Sunshine Award which is awarded to “bloggers who positively and creatively inspire others in the blogosphere”. My friend Sue and I met at the conference I mention so often (Titus 2:1). I mention it frequently because it has been pivotal in my life. Sue is one of those pivots. Meeting her was to experience instantaneous and permanent friendship. She is the definition of sunshine, and I smiled thinking how fitting for another friend to label her just so.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

Award winners are asked to nominate ten other bloggers who inspire others. It's a fun way to create a blog roll when you get right down to it. I was excited to see who would inspire my inspiring friend. Are you laughing already? Yes. There was my blog listed among her top 10 faves. I just LOL'd. Not to be cliché.

You see, she is an army nurse practitioner that has served 'in theater'. That's fancy talk for in a combat zone. She has 6 kiddos and a spouse still on active duty. She homeschools, and she blogs. She is in triathlons for goodness sakes! She is an iron woman to my fraidy cat. How in the world I inspire her is anybody's guess, especially mine! But, I love her to pieces and can't thank her enough for being the 1-2 punch of encouragement in my life today.

Let me introduce you to MY favorite blogs worthy of the Sunshine Award in their own rights. The weekend is coming. Stay in out of the heat, and peruse my little neighborhood of the blogging universe?

1. Learning Table is presently nominated by Circle of Moms as one of the top 25 Teacher Moms of 2012. (Drop by and vote for her?) She is my IRL friend and sister of the heart.
2. Eternal Instants is one of the sweetest blogs I've seen. One look at her photography and companion blog posts and you'll be hooked! 
    
3. The Daisyhead is one of my blogging mentors. You won't want to miss her series, Our Sick Babies. She blogs about crocheting, green living, homeschooling and more. She's like the Target of blogs - so much under one roof! She taught me how to compost the lazy way!
   
   
4. 

   Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

    Deeper With Jesus in Rhode Island is the reason I nearly quit blogging. Lori's words are so compelling I feel there is simply nothing left to say. If you need to drink deeply from the well of living water, she has the cup.
5. The Budget Maven is a young lady who ignored the differences in our ages and adopted me as her friend. Her blog has won awards two years in a row at the Blue Ridge Mountain Christian Writers Conference. For good reason, I'm sure you'll see.
   
   
6. Beth Pensinger is another young lady who stole my heart when she compared me to her beloved aunt. She has a heart for young 20/30-somethings and is working on a book that will speak to many. 
    
7. Amber Howard Massey has a heart for horses and the people who ride them. She is working on a devotional book, derived from her blog. I love her concept of teaching spiritual lessons via her riding experiences. 
    

8. 

   Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

   Meet Penny is another of my blogging mentors. She is a tour de force of homsechooling info, couponing info, freebies, ebooks and too many more projects to name. She is both a Pinterest and blogging award winner. 
    
9.   Lovin My Crazy Life details the ups and downs of life as a mom. She maintains a vibrant sense of humor despite the challenges of  her son's autism and related learning struggles. 
   
   

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      Jennifer A. James is one of the kindest, most thoughtful people I've met. Her blog echos hear heart as she encourages homeschooling moms.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

Now for 10 things about me: My favorite color is blue. My favorite animal is the leafy sea horse. I have no favorite number. (Who makes up these Q's???) If you know me, you know my favorite drink is hot chocolate...even when it is 107F in the shade. Facebook over twitter any day. Good movie vs good book unless I have downtime. My passion – to be God's head cheerleader. Getting vs giving gifts bcz I find it hard to receive. Favorite day is any day I do something out of the ordinary and get out of the house. Hey, I homeschool. I don't get out much! ;-) Favorite flowers are hydrangeas, calla lilies, and zinnias.

Courtesy B. Creasy 2010

I am so grateful for you, my fraidy cat friends. I am equally grateful for my blogging community. Every time this fraidy cat gets ready to throw in the towel, one of these bloggers comes to my rescue. I hope you'll thank them for encouraging me to keep doing what I do . . . even when I'm not sure you are out there! Love you long and strong. See you soon?

Remembering Who We Never Were -- Homeless Pt 6

Even now, 6 yrs later, I grow numb when sudden news of someone else's crisis plunges me back into the darkness. When it happens, I no longer panic. It's just my old, newly named friend, 'traumatic stress reaction', reminding me that the past is always there. The sense of numbness that paralyzes my heart slithers along my spine upon viewing a simple status update on Facebook. I see the veiled allusion to a life Tsunami, and I know.  Behind those matter of fact words, a heart cries out in confusion and pain too raw and fresh to describe in detail.  I find myself falling into step beside the one whose suffering has erupted like a frenzied volcano. No words are needed. I just walk.

As far as I feel from God these days, I know this reaction is, in part, that sense of comforting others with the same comfort we ourselves have been comforted (2 Cor. 1: 3-4). No one has to tell you how to do it. It's like giving birth. Once you've walked the walk, you just know how to fall into step. You also know that trying to say anything is fruitless. There is a peaceful solace in knowing that it is ok to walk in tandem without trying to give answers or frivolous consolations. You've been there. You know there are times that no answers are sufficient to stem the flow of blood from a broken heart. The process is unavoidable even for Christians who believe in a loving God that constantly watches over his suffering children. The only thing you can do is hunker down and live thru the process...or walk with someone else while they do.


I had bled every day for 6 yrs from the time Jeff got sick until the new landlord said he'd take a chance on our sorry butts and condescend to let us rent from him.  Yea, he was more diplomatic than that. Behind the mouth noise I knew he felt he had to make, I also knew what he was thinking. And, that was pretty much it!

survivors

We set about to figure out who we were even as the shock of our long awaited and sudden change of circumstances left us reeling. One phone call changed our lives, but it took a while for us to accept the change as real. Stress is stress whether it is good or bad.  I could feel our long knotted up nerves begin to unknot.  We moved along tentatively stopping to check the ends of our ropes. We realized that in the years that lay behind, some of our ropes had frayed beyond repair.


I realized I felt like an invisible nobody.  In our country, so much of who we are is defined by who we look like on paper or what we possess. What we had left had been in storage for 2 yrs. Our cars were no longer trendy, and they'd have to last at least 3 more years. On paper, we were failures whom no one dared do business with. Even if we had wanted to 'do business', the officer of the court held us in tow until July of 2008. Without the court's express permission, we would be in contempt of court to do anything but pay cash as we went. Even tho' we'd never been 'credit hounds', that reality was a chain around our souls. That bondage was the price we paid for failing.


I could tell myself all day long that we had always been good stewards. So good, in fact, that it had taken the buzzards 3 yrs to pick our bones clean. But, now we looked just like every other yuppie out there who couldn't delay gratification. Why, I wondered, had I deprived myself of so much in the interest of fiscal responsibility to end up like this? An invisible nobody.  All those extra payments I had scraped together to pay on the interest of the house the bank gave to someone else for a pittance of what we owed on it – for what?  How many spa treatments could I have enjoyed in the moment while I was living for the reward of compound interest derived tomorrow.

I thought all those things in the shadows of my heart. In the light of day, I told myself and my boys that God had a plan. It was a good plan. He had just kick-started the good part of that plan into motion.  We began to revel in our privacy. I became the kind of mom who no longer expected her kids to do chores. It was so amazing to have my own house to do chores in again that I didn't want to share the joy. (Yea, I was one sick puppy! I got over that little dip into insanity, trust me!) We spent an hour every night talking as a family about our list of 'thankful things'. We had made it out of the valley of the shadows.  We were survivors!

We immersed ourselves into the normalcy of life and began to accept that the locust had eaten their fill and moved on to other still green pastures. And yet, there was a hollowness at our core. The sense permeated my days. It was as if our souls had been robbed by some soul eating zombies that had left only shells of people to go thru the motions of life. We were  a pretty picture of hope borne out of despair. We might as well have been a carefully stitched representation of the picturesque implication of a stress free life. We were pretty on the public side.  The mass of chaotically knotted thread ends on the back of that framed masterpiece would have been closer to the truth.

Ours had been a hard marriage complicated by dynamics that had perplexed and puzzled me for 16 yrs. I had spent countless hours rearranging the puzzle pieces of our lives together. I was always trying to make our journey as a couple make sense. There always seemed to be a piece missing as if we'd come from the marriage factory an incomplete, defective kit.


We had been thru nine marriage counselors in 16 yrs. We would, frankly, have been divorced but for one thing...we were too broke to hire the lawyers to seal our fate. We were out of the valley of shadows, but the light purely revealed that we were strangers. We lived as housemates sharing chores and responsibilities but none of the perks of the vows we took all those years before. I had once heard being single was not nearly as lonely as being lonely in a marriage. If that phrase was defined in a picture dictionary, I would have been the poster girl.


One sad, lonely day, my marriage cum business partner turned to me and said, “I've made an appointment with a counselor. Will you go?” I looked at him thru zombie dead eyes and said, “If the first 9 didn't fix us, this one won't either. You go if you want. I'm done.” And, he did. Every other week for the next 6 months, he did.

Oh my. Like I said a few posts ago, we had no idea how much deeper the shadows could get. Like I said on my 'about me' page, I've been thru enough that the fraidy cat in me is well acquainted with the fraidy cat in you. This is hard work. I don't blame you if you don't come back. I hope you will. I hope when you do, you will bring a friend. Fraidy cats rule, but only if they stick together.

To ready part one of our story, click here: Writing My Way Back to God