He Sees Me and Knows My Frame

For he knows our frame; he remembers that we are dust.  Psalms 103:14 ESV, 2016

More ramblings of my heart and thoughts as we rebuild and I scratch and claw to find beauty from ashes in places physical and unseen.  Editing is minimal and thoughts are long.  The combination doesn’t always make for a clean copy, but it is honest copy.

It feels and looks distinctly like a standstill with the rebuilding of our home.  Beauty for ashes seems to be mostly ashes muddled with the heavy Memphis heat and humidity.  It is uncomfortable and unsightly.  I hate it.

At 7:30 am, I muttered, “Why? Why am I up with my head pounding?” Fear settled in. I huffed and puffed and even lashed out at the hearts of my loves reacting to the familiar fear and because I couldn’t fight that I began fighting everyone around me.  A pounding headache and familiar nausea brought me right back to the helpless circumstances of the life around me that caused these headaches as an 11/12-year-old.  Our bodies take on a voice when our voices are taken and not honored. My head pounded it out.

Comfort was impossible and after making everyone around me uncomfortable, I fled the scene for home.  Unfortunately home is a burnt out house with only studs and the still familiar smell of smoke where work is at a stall because red tape like fire slows us all down.  I sat in my bedroom staring through the studs at my attic stairs.  I could stare straight through the walls of my children’s rooms and the spaces from the place that brought me comfort that I can not race back to right now.  The walls stared straight through me as the tears fell.

My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Psalms 139:15 ESV, 2016

I can be seen through.  I do not have the energy nor the want to hide the pain of the fire or the pains of a lifetime. I am strangely comforted by the undoing the unhiding the ability to see “what I am made of” from the inside out.  I am sturdy even if charred a little around the edges, but there are weak spots and painful splinters that must be rebuilt and renewed.

I believe the frame of our home was built in 1985.  In the summer of 1985, I was 12 going on 13 and my undoing and all of the fires of my childhood were coming to a fateful peak.  My foundation was being torn away at and splintered at every corner.  Yesterday, that pounding headache from 1985 landed me on a bathroom floor sick from the heat of sitting in our burned out home and stunned by the words and actions that I flailed around in for 12 hours of childhood panic in 2018.  Facing fires is not for the faint of heart.  My rebuilding for the last 25 years includes a husband who will pull me out of ashes and children who will forgive flailing words and heated actions.  None of us will go back home the same it seems, however, while it looks like there is nothing being repaired at our address and we are at a standstill my frame is growing stronger even in the weakest most hidden places.  This is not the way I would have chosen to walk through these places.  I likely would have never visited these wounds, but I  also would have never torn down the walls of my home to make it stronger and reveal the worn places had it not been for the fire.  Sometimes beauty and healing choose us because we would never know to choose them.  I’m still not sure I will find myself grateful for this undoing, but I am willing to walk through it honestly knowing that the Lord has made it impossible for me to settle for anything less.