Category: rebuilding

When Days Aren’t Ordered

This year I didn’t order my days according to the November calendar. It didn’t occur to me. Gratitude has not disappeared, but the ordered days of knowing my next thing next rare.

Bittersweet

Ordering my days was my specialty. Accounting for the details and anticipating how I would need to anticipate a plan for every contingent outcome of living, good or bad, helped with an unsteady sense of safety and multiplied my anxiety.

Incongruent

I have found less anxiety walking with less assurance of safety. This was not a twist I was expecting.

Facing fires and bad guys and grief in the same breaths of stillness and innocence and life didn’t kill me even as had my built in safety shift and change and sometimes disappear all together. Life is harder and more connected and worth it today.

This was just last year when I was ordering my days; it was a hard day. I remember it distinctly. I had been hurt and I hardened my outside for this season I’m still muddling through while tentatively trying to keep my heart soft. God is good to protect and shield the fragility of our hearts. I remember feeling a tangible physical shift as I exhaled just after taking this picture. I couldn’t have imagined my life today. I wish in some ways I had known more about the coming months, not to change the living of these 365 days , but to absorb more of what would change or go away. I wish I understood that there would be other things I could never unknow and appreciate the ignorance.

Today, This Moment, I do not wish none of it had ever happened.

I am not grateful for it all today. No. However, I do not want to run from it all. Come to find out, the very safety I was running for is closer than I thought.

Tales of a Life Shattered and Peaceful

Tales of the Bedside Table is brought to you by real life at the Weaver family home. I gave many years of fall aparts to others in our home, but I was strong at any cost outside my doors. I imagined shattering one day and my pain flowing out in waves and drowning those in relationships with me. I had no idea that living a life shattered could put me back together and the relationships that drowned would give way for peace to breath in really living unafraid.

Since meeting the Weaver’s via text, we have had 2 graduations, a fire, a wedding, a freshman college drop off, a break up, a new love, town house flooding, and most recently a car breaking down. Keeping up the appearance of “ok” has been stripped from me and my “ok” is ruffled and rattling and raising the white flag. Yet, God went before and created the sweetest new space for our family in the most unexpected way. God sees. God knows.

All of my adult life, I did more than keep up appearances. I fought with all of my strength to exceed the “right way” because the fear of messing up and losing it all or having someone take my life’s hope and family was a very present and a very real threat. Attention at all cost to all the details was my family’s safety from the “what if’s” that continually became our “now what’s.” I let go of my “only if I…” family and gained peace for our safety. Turns out they could try and take my people and tell me my hope was false and not get either. I let go. It was hard, gut wrenching hard. They did not get our children or their hope . I buried my personal hope.

God sees. God knows.

God gives and renews and builds where once there was nothing. Firm foundations and quick sand alike can be swept away and God. Is. Still there. We’ve lost so much and gained a crazy peace. We grieve and rejoice. Today, the Weavers got the all undone as He creates all new. Today, God gives me the gift of shattered super glue living and grief unfathomable and peace not understood and strength in despairing weakness and people unexpected from my yesterday’s and could never have imagined brand new today’s. Today, I see glimpses of personal hope with my breathing in and out.

Brand new moments shared with eternity familiarity is family. Right now, the undone, vulnerable, honest at all cost about the pain and joys are who I am with my children, my husband, my friends, and myself. Realizing these truths at the Bedside Table has been my mustard seed and proof positive of His value of me and the strength He has uncovered in upending the letting go of a lifetime. God sees and knows.