Living Phoenix

Tag: god

  • We Climb with the Window in the Weather, But We Prepare During the Storm

    We Climb with the Window in the Weather, But We Prepare During the Storm

    “You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: what is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen.” Rene Daumal

    Once, while married, happy, and safe, I lived my entire day for the promise of bedtime. That glorious moment when you gather the bedside waters, vitamins, and books. Fan blowing across the bed, dogs curled up, and your partner in her glasses reading, you feel your day melt away as you crawl beneath the comforter between soft clean sheets. I still remember how my heart rate would slow, her hair in my face, rubbing feet as an early but welcomed sleep would fall in a quiet dark room. A fresh morning would await. Enter the shock of grief: the grim serial killer of restorative rest. It isn’t merely the loneliness of the bed that once was filled with a covenant of love, it is the intrusive and unwelcome memories like ghosts haunting throughout the night. Sleep will allude you now, quiet will haunt, and rest will be a thing of the past like a fading childhood memory that you are unsure if you experienced first hand or simply heard the story so many times it seems like it was at some point real. Those nights of tormented sleep, hungover mornings despite sobriety, are when we notice the violence of the storm the most intensely.

    It is not only the early days of our grieving that plague our sleep. This sick disease goes on for months- sometimes years. God’s love is certainly not evident that one person can sleep soundly with their choices while the other one writhes in pain month after month. No more than the question of the ones we love who died whereabouts in the comfort of an afterlife. For that requires a little more blind faith than the miracles we will witness here on earth, or so it seems. None-the-less, we were designed to persist. And we owe the world our persistence. So we move on like the grittiest of endurance athletes. If only grit alone would bear our trials and deliver us to the other side of this horrific storm. What to do when our perseverance lets us down, and it will, and we fall back toward our last camp on Grief Mountain?

    Summits and safe descents are made on the planning and timing of the weather windows in our storms. With grief, we sit longer, we think longer and deeper, we find ourselves snowed in and enclosed from the outside elements. Everything we do to prepare for that short break in the weather makes the difference in our progress up and down the mountain. Who can command the storms and quiet the wind? To whom shall we call out when the waves threaten to overturn our boat?

    “The disciples went and woke him up, shouting, Lord save us! We are going to drown. Jesus responded, why are you afraid? You have so little faith! Then he got up and rebuked the wind and waves, and suddenly there was a great calm.” Matthew 8:25-26

    So often, in our most painful time, it seems that Jesus sleeps while we hold onto the boat for dear life. We scream out for him to awake and rebuke the wind and the waves. The grit we have is there to help us hold on while we await his awakening and take command of our storm. And for every break in the weather, every time God quiets the rain, we move further to the back of the boat where one day, we hope, we might find rest beside him.

    We are driven to the summit because we have seen it before. Though it’s beauty evades our eyes, it’s memory lives on in our hearts. We prepare for that window in the weather: we pray, eat, clean up our lives, slowly grow accustomed to the pain of the cold wind, in-by-inch, until the storm ceases and we emerge ready to climb. Knowing with every step the weather will again change, but stronger now because we prepared a little more with each passing storm.

  • Sunday Sidebar: My darkest parts

    Sunday Sidebar: My darkest parts

    Sunday sidebar’s are strictly for me. They are a moment I am not apologizing and owning all of the responsibility. A moment where I don’t need to connect to someone in need. A moment this is not a ministry, a project, a journey, a creation. Sunday sidebar’s are my moment to spill my feelings without second thought or edit. The silent and embarrassing thoughts that keep me from my sleep. They are for me. Remember me? The one who broke your heart? The one who you condemned without a second thought or single conversation. The one you publicly shamed. Stripped bare. Walked away as if I was nothing. As if I was living a lie. As if I hadn’t been an amazing person, friend, or husband. How easy to not judge the ones you call family and friends and strangers for their worse moments- a moment of need made opportunity of abandonment.

    Festering beneath the guilt and shame, like great tectonic plates shifting, sliding, grinding, carrying the weight of my faults and my mistakes- anger. The person who claimed to know me, who coaxed my most vulnerable self, who preached for sensitivity and emotional availability- what was actually needed was me to be there for her darkest self but be careful in sharing my own. Walked away as if I was a gum wrapper beneath a strangers shoe. Every hope and dream you set in flames and blamed every ash on me. Searching solace in every person, calling the peace you have in your heart from God- may God give you that peace despite putting your decisions on him. As if he brought me peace for my mistakes. No, that was wrath. Divine punishment. Not peace. And yet this anger gets but a second notice and my sadness at your absence owns my daily life. My prayers for your happiness out number those for my own. While you hate with a cold heart.

    Great pain does one bring who testifies their need for honesty while using self lies to bring about their own peaceful life.

    Closure? Closure is death for most human souls. Hope? Hope is an afterlife free from pain. But if God is so keen for us to suffer here how are we so certain suffering does not await? He is always faithful to his promises but no promise is earthly. So hope is only in what awaits that which we do not know.

    Anger is fleeting and overlies my fear. It vanishes as quickly as it came, but the fear remains. The desire to be whole again, the reality I will not, and my only prayer that the person that took everything that made me human will remain happy, safe, and whole- that is the reality of life. But the small glimpses of beauty- the stars, the trees, the approaching storm clouds, the sound of laughter- keeps my hope in God as my memory of what was the most beautiful fades away day-by-day.

  • If Grief Is the Price We Pay for Love, Who Covers the Cost: Good Mourning

    If Grief Is the Price We Pay for Love, Who Covers the Cost: Good Mourning

    “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the same yawning. I keep on swallowing.” C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed

    A shocking truth about grief and mourning is that it is a chronic disease. That mourning resembles the time of day only as a heterograph, but better approximates eternity as a synonym, is undesired irony. The clinical picture is constant aching pain with fluctuating intensity described as waives of aching and stabbing pain, nausea, lightheadedness, and emotional lability. There is the inability to eat or sleep despite the oppressive weight of fatigue and sudden loss of motivation to get off the couch. And yet, we are expected to wake up each morning, go to work, take care of our family, maintain our health, concentrate amidst constant uncontrollable waves of memories that tear at the edges of our gaping wound of loss. This is the misery of grief, that in moments as time progresses we try to convince ourselves that we will be okay and that life will move on. We will string together, at first, a few minutes to hours of emotional reconciliation: only to, unprepared and unaware, be speared into pieces by a sudden fleeting memory. Sometimes it is triggered by something you shared together. Sometimes it arrives like a thief in the night to rob you of your will to live. There is no good mourning. There is no sensible mourning. Grief is the most painful human emotion, but is the least human experience.

    Perhaps it feels the least human because it is the emotion that brings us closest to God. Or, as we often feel in the moment, the absence of God. Either way, whichever side of the spectrum you find yourself from one minute to the next in these volatile circumstances, it is when one cannot help but at least desire a divine presence. Help. Comfort. Peace. Deliverance. Forgiveness. Healing. Resurrection. Death. I am wary to offer the word blessing behind any intention of grief, for blessings are unwelcome in a cloud of darkness so thick. However, perhaps the mechanism behind the pain could be an eventual choice of blessing rather than immediate gratification of death. It is during the early moments of grief and mourning that we tend to underestimate our worth in this world the most. We made enough mistakes, don’t make that one.

    There is one constant in our mourning during grief. A deep void, or absence, left in our entire being. By entire being I mean this sensation of a missing piece is experienced physically, emotionally, spiritually, mentally. As the primary result of the massive portion of our being ripped from our chest, we experience indescribable pain. I believe that is why denial, the first phase of grief we will soon explore, is the most logical and desperate starting point in a rush to self preserve. Our whole world construct, the entire reality of the life we created, has just collapsed into the ashes in a single moment. If our reality ceases to exist, so does our acceptance of the circumstances. We deny that reality exists, after all it no longer does as we conceived it, and we rush to fill that void desperate to stop the hurt.

    I was told by someone the fastest way to get over someone is to get under another. What a desperate false hope. Adding a poison to an open wound. Taking the few remaining pieces of your soul and giving them away until the void covers you in entirety and you are unrecognizable as a person. I have felt, myself, the desire to use alcohol or drugs to manage the pain. A liars crutch. Adding more chaos to chaos. Pouring gasoline onto a raging fire. No, there is nothing that is big enough to fill that void, that undesired painful emptiness, except something greater than our human experience. There is nothing big enough to fill that void but God. And perhaps that is evident, at our lowest, when we first feel the unimaginable pain of loss and we rush to pull ourselves from the fire that we so often think, God help me. Perhaps it is the spark of the divine that is written in our very DNA that points us to the only real answer. Perhaps, when everyone you loved has turned away and all is lost, God is the only one left beside you. And perhaps it is because He is reaching for you, pulling you in, because this terror is real but so is He.

    God is not the absence of mourning. “I dress the skies in darkness, covering them with clothes of mourning.” Isaiah 50:3. He is the hopeful presence among it and the pathway beyond it. “You have turned my mourning into joyful dancing. You have taken away my clothes of mourning and clothed me with joy.” Psalms 30:11. There is no doubt that this pain will be remembered for a lifetime. But a life is both too short to remain in our darkest moments and too long to be defined by it. God understands this is the most severe and complex human emotion. He understands this pain is more than we can bear. Sometimes, the severity of the pain is unnecessary and if only the other person involved would look to God in the same way it could be healed and joyous. But their will is not yours and their needs are their own. Sometimes, the other person is no longer living and you are left to heal without the hope of their return. Whatever it is, however it came about, our first lifeline is that despite our greatest loss God will continue to write our story. Take comfort in that He is an author who only writes happy endings for those characters that choose His pages.

    There is no good mourning. The pain that comes with grief will dissipate, but even now as I write, memories and fears of the person I lost come and go and feel as real and painful as the day it occurred. They may be dead, or they may have moved on, they may have patched their void with another person, place, or thing. But your hurt is uniquely yours. And it is going to show itself for a longtime to come. So our focus belongs not on the fears but on the only hope we have in the person of Jesus Christ. If we gain anything from the ashes of this fire it is that we are not our few mistakes. We are the children of God who have loved deeply, cared freely, grown immensely, and are of the highest value to the Kingdom of our creator. Why else would he be the only one there in our minds when we look up from our greatest tragedy.

    The cost of love is grief. The cost of anything worth having is great. And when we realize that cost it is only natural to feel bankrupt because we don’t have the resources to manage this type of transaction. But that high cost of pain can be covered on our loving Father’s account. No strings attached. No interest. Paid in full before you were ever born.