I Can See Clearly Now (Pt. 2)

Courtesy and In Loving Memory of Christina Jones Hooker

You could just feel the lady's sense of shame ooze through the computer screen. Something had happened. Exactly what she did not feel free to say. She needed prayer for a child in crisis. She was eating a big ole plate of humble pie served up cold. Both the crisis and the pie were breaking her heart. You could read it between the lines.

I had not met her before. Our paths crossed because we were both in the same group that had an e-loop. She was crying out to know she had a soft place to fall. She expressed that desire by asking us to pray. In response, I did the un-fraidy cat thing. I sent a private email introducing myself and telling her that I too had a child that was struggling. I doubted I'd ever hear from her.

In fact, I did get a few replies. Know what broke her as much as the crisis that had befallen her family out of nowhere? She was now the recipient of the same kind of judgment she had doled out before her life turned upside down. “How could I have been like that?” she wondered via email. “I thought I had it all together. I thought this kind of thing would never happen to me.” Oh the agony.

Courtesy and In Loving Memory of Christina Jones Hooker

Her sanctimony had risen up to bite her in the seat of her understanding. At least she was humble enough to understand her sin and weep over it. I did what I could to encourage her in the moment. I sometimes wish I'd hear from her again and breathe a prayer that her humility served her well as she looked for answers and direction.

We work so hard at making it look so easy, we Christians. Let me tell you a secret that is gonna get me kicked out of some places. Where 2 or 3 Christians are gathered together, you are gonna find 2 or 3 people who do NOT have their act together. I don't care what kind of shine-ola they fancy up with. Behind our fancy masks, we are wrecks JUST LIKE YOU. Or...we are a wreck waiting to happen just like that sweet, suffering friend I never met.

Oh yea, 2 of the 3 are gonna be real good at putting on a happy face and telling you the world is rosy even when they take off those rose colored glasses. The 3rd one might actually have it all together..for the moment. Just like my friend whom disaster had visited when least expected.

Courtesy A. Squires

Every once in a while, you might meet someone like me. Some of you will run as fast and as far as you can get because the truth is a scary thing. You'd rather keep your mask and your rosy illusions. Others are gonna lean closer because you feel truth resonate to the core of your bones even if it is kinda like looking at a wreck on the highway to think about what I'm saying.

I can admit this truth because it is not nearly as hard as what I did in my 20's. I set out on 'my own' to find a faith of 'my own'. I could no longer blindly follow the faith of my family just because it was ours. That inner voice kept telling me I was looking for something I had not found. As much a traitor to the cause as I felt, I broke my parents' hearts. They made their peace with my choices, but the sting never left, I fear.

You see, they had expected me to do the daughter-ly thing. My mission in life should have been to go to Bible college, meet and marry a preacher-boy, and bring him home to help Daddy run whatever church he happened to be in at the time. I would be one of the musicians, and he would be the Associate. It was a plan I had been groomed for since the 3rd day of my life when I sat in that infant seat on the piano bench of the church.

New Mexico 2001

Hello. Have you met me? I'm the girl who took her tricycle for a spin on a road that accommodated 100MPH+ traffic. Should they not have seen me coming? Or going? By the time I was 12 and turned down my spot on the baptism line-up, I also knew I was not gonna marry no preacher. Forgive the southern speak double negative. I'm a writer. I know better. It just comes out when I'm adamant.


Oh my, fellow fraidy cat. I think that may be about all you and I can handle for tonight. This water is deep. I don't want to go too far too fast for any of our sakes.


For tonight, just know this. If you are on the outside looking in thinking you'll never belong to a family of faith because we all 'have it together' and won't let you in our 'club' because you don't and never will, that voice is lying to you. If you are already a part of this family of faith but feel as if you have to keep your mask on lest someone figure out you don't have your inner act together, someone is lying to you as well. If you are hurting and in crisis and think no one will understand because a crisis like yours doesn't happen to 'good' Christians, don't even get me started! Oh wait, I already am!

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

Welcome home fraidy cat. You see, I've been there, done that, and have the T-shirt to prove it as we say here in the south. Come on in from the cold and sit a spell. Warm yourself. You are safe here. You belong.

John 16:33 (NASB)
These things I have spoken to you, so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world.

Courtesy Mad Penguin Creative

2 Corinthians 12:10 (NASB)
Therefore I am well content with weaknesses, with insults, with distresses, with persecutions, with difficulties, for Christ's sake; for when I am weak, then I am strong.

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