Latter Days

These days this song by Over the Rhine has been speaking to my heart. This last summer was a series of unexpected events. I wrestled almost daily with the drastic difference between my own expectations and the plans that God seemed to have. I found my mantra being "Your will be done" not necessarily out of a heart of obedience but more out of desperation that I didn't know what else to say. This went on for a couple of months & then within a matter of weeks I had a serious family tragedy that was a double whammy because of both the situation and the resulting interactions with my family, had finals for 2 summer classes, turned 30, had a change in relationship status & was told that my rent was increasing by 3 times its current amount. At this point I turned from "Your will be done" to "Really God!? Are you kidding me!? I can't do this!" I felt so completely taxed that I lost most of my ability to cope & turned into a person that I did not recognize & couldn't imagine being for the rest of my life. It wasn't that I was a crazed lunatic but I wasn't myself, the inner turmoil was so uncomfortable that I was constantly seeking distractions & wasn't able to just exist, it was exhausting.

In the midst of all this my friend Kyle offered what has turned out to be such comforting advice, "I promise you that it won't always be like this. I will take some time, but it will get easier. I promise." In the moment I let out a sigh of relief simply because he didn't say anything to make matters worse.

Side note: For me one of the hardest parts of being in the midst of intense pain was being around other people, and I LOVE people. I felt like I could cope & exist when I was with friends or by myself but when I had to go out into the "real world" and the unexpected, even the grocery store, I had such hyper-sensitivity & little capacity that I found myself praying just to make it through conversations without falling apart & add that sometimes people say insensitive things & I was really anxious to wrap conversations up. So when Kyle offered not only advice from experience but that it was laced in kindness, I was very thankful.


For more than a month after the advice I was wondering when "easier" was going to kick in. Every single day was tough in some way or another & people "in the know" were telling me that, "life changes you" & that I needed to embrace the fact that I would forever be impacted by this portion of life. That it was impossible to go back to being the person I was before all this happened. I could get behind the logic of what they said & even agree that I wanted to let life change me for the better, to let these situations and their intense proximity to each other mold me into something more than I was before. But I still clung to Kyle's encouragement hoping that his "easier" was just around the corner & contained more than just an acceptance that life was hard and filled with struggles.

It was almost 2 months later before I had had 2 "normal" days in a row, granted the 3rd day was rough but I was so encouraged by those 2 that I didn't mind the 3rd as much. Over the next several weeks Kyle's promise began to take form and since then while things are still being processed & worked through & some days are still tough Kyle was right.


When I think about what got me back to the place of having more good than rough days there are all sorts of things that come to mind; great friends, a solid relationship with the Lord that could take a beating, a family that was willing to talk through things & give space when needed and while in no way do I take lightly the impact of those factors I think one of the biggest contributors to my return to "normality" was simply time. In fact, it has even been time that has grown the other listed factors into such important aspects of my life. While it can seem like a cheap cliche to say, "time heals all wounds" or "give it time", time cannot be underestimated. I can think of so many examples of interactions where had I allowed for a little time between receiving information and responding, I would have responded a whole lot different. While this need for time is inconvenient because we have no control over it & actually have to implement self-discipline, experience and wisdom would encourage us to embrace that things are changing and God is working.


If my own experiences aren't enough I only need to look around to see how God is using/has used time to change things. Family members who used to have broken relationships that are now healed, friends whose bitterness showed on their face & now smile, and countless biblical examples of a delay between a persons call and the fulfillment of that call; Abraham & Sarah, Moses, Noah, Ruth, David, Paul, Jesus, etc. Sometimes we know why God took the time he did and sometimes we don't but I think the point is is that things today aren't the same as they'll be tomorrow. That today's realities are true and tangible but they are also viable and consistently being morphed to fit the present which was once the future. This concept is nice in theory but it is only because of my belief in an all loving and interactive God that I can relax at all & be engaged with the present and hopeful for the future.

So while these latter days have taken their toll and some days I have a hard time remembering the big picture moment by moment, which turns into day by day, God is changing me and fulfilling his promises, Kyle's promise, to me.

Gone...yet not.

This summer my older brother committed suicide in a horrible and tragic way. It has been the hardest thing I've ever had to go through in my life. It's been a little over 2 months now since it happened and I'm just now beginning to feel like a "normal" human again, where I can think about things other than him or my own pain and where I can be in social situations & enjoy myself rather than be petrified that I could fall apart at any moment either due to my own internal situation or because someone will want to talk about it. Let me just say for the record if you know that something has happened just do everyone a favor, say it right away and then go on to being normal. The anticipation and small talk before hand is torture, we all know it's coming, don't try to ease me into it.

The journey has been much different than I would have thought. It's interesting because this time last year one of my seminary classes required I write a paper on grief & in it describe how I would deal with someone dealing with grief. While I took it seriously I also made light of the situation, making 70's cultural references and developing the storyline around the BeeGee's & their loss of Maurice Gibb, may he rest in peace. Even then I cared about the topic but I didn't really know what I would say to someone going through such pain. While there have been other painful things in life that have broken my heart, I still felt very unprepared for this. I flop between not knowing what to think, not wanting to talk about it & feeling like I'm marked with a warning sign; caution fragile cargo.

For weeks after the funeral I didn't want to talk about Matt at all. I was thinking about him all the time, wondering what I could have done different to love him better, remembering things I'd said or we'd done, thinking about his kids & how they were going to grow up, all sorts of things but I refused to talk about him. Then I went through a phase of refusing to even think about him. I needed a break, my heart was a mess & I felt like I couldn't both exist & deal with him so I'd just pack him & all that pain up for another day, but that didn't last for long.

About a week ago I was minding my own business, merging onto I5 and like a ton of bricks it hit me: "He's never ever coming back." I was pissed! Partially because I love him so much but mostly because he made a decision that so greatly impacted me without letting me have a say in said decision. He was the one who got to decide when it was over & he didn't have the courtesy to ask if I was okay with that. I realize that most people who commit suicide don't ask this type of question but I was still pissed about it.

I cried for my whole drive, sad that it was over & there was nothing I could do to change it, no amount of problem solving or brainstorming would bring him back. I cried for both of us, for our pain, his that would drive him to this & mine because of it, and for the loss of our future together.

The next day I was in the middle of getting ready to move & I opened my front door to find this on the porch

I know it's disgusting but it's also very funny and beautiful. Funny because in my eulogy I told a story about how Matt & I had found a squirrel on our walk home from school in 1st & 2nd grade & what we did with it for the next couple of days, just kids being kids. It was beautiful because I felt like God was reminding me that while Matt was gone forever I still had so many memories that weren't gone & those would keep him in my life forever.

I still don't know how I feel the majority of the time & I mostly keep asking God to work through this & not waste my pain. When things like a dead squirrel on my porch happen I am reassured that while I don't understand it He does care about me, hears me and loves me very much and that just as much as I haven't forgotten Matt, God hasn't forgotten me.

One month into my 30's

I've looked forward to turning 30 for the last 5 years. I was convinced that being 30 would mean that people would finally see me as the capable adult I was & had worked so hard to be. While I'm not sure how people see me, I feel less capable than ever. While some more mature adult might try to convince me that that is the point, realizing that I never really was capable, I'm not falling for it. I'm now just convinced that it will come sometime this decade rather than on the day I turned 30.

This "capability" realization hit hard today as I was on my way to a friends house. Since I have the habit of "prepping" before a scheduled hang out time, I was thinking about what I wanted to talk about. While I thought of a short list, more than that I realized how there were so many things I wanted to talk about but wouldn't know what to say. I feel like humpty dumpty, since I believe in a sovereign God I know it's just a feeling, but that doesn't negate that it is my reality. Over the past 5 months I feel like I've been asked to give away pieces of my shell and while I willing gave some small & medium sized pieces away the bigger pieces were a lot harder to give & some very large pieces I feel like were just straight up jacked from me when I wasn't looking. So now what? Have I done this to myself? Is the moral of this story: keep it together & don't give anything away? As an advocate of authenticy & community I can't support that but yet I am not comfortable staying in this place either.

I can't live in pieces on the ground, I know for sure the kings men, whomever they are, won't be able to put me back together & I don't even know if I want to be put back together, at least not exactly the way I was. Being in pieces has meant feeling all sorts of things I've never felt before; both being loved and loving in a way I didn't know was possible, being so angry that I actually tried to start a fist fight with a grown man, standing in front of friends feeling exposed & scared while waiting for their response and feeling the most intense pain I've ever felt in my entire life. Life has not been like this before but I'm beginning to think that this is more accurate to "real life" than what I've known up to this point.

Today as I was having lunch with Larson & we were catching up on life she asked me if it was worth it & it wasn't a hard answer, "yes". She might have been referring to a specific event but both the question and the answer is applicable across the pieces of my life right now. I still don't know what to say when I think about what's going on or how I'm supposed to be handling life right now, as this capable adult, but since cashing in isn't an option & I can't change what it is, I guess I'll just keep going, fumbling around. I'm really hoping that at some point I'll look back and "get it", maybe that comes at 40.