Take me to a place with books – any place, and I feel like I am in heaven. But yesterday, I went into a bookstore looking for a specific book my husband had requested, and unlike almost any other time I have been in a bookstore, I felt unseen. Out of place. Like not a single one of those books could meet me where I was.
I am untethered these days. I am just not really myself.
We are on medical leave in the US because my husband is really struggling health-wise. We have many questions but not as many answers about what is wrong. We are unsure whether we can return to the field. Our hearts miss home overseas and are sinking at the prospect of having to relocate permanently back to the US.
At the same time, I am recovering from pretty significant emotional, relational, and spiritual trauma – still very much in the thick of it, with post traumatic stress symptoms being part of my daily life. My sister-in-law is dying of cancer. My kids are struggling with lots of grief. I have often had to function like a single parent and am exhausted from being always “on.”
I go from grief to numbness to shock to denial to hope to wanting to shield all of us from so much pain. I want to go to sleep and not wake up for a very long time. I eat fudge ice cream, sip a cold sangria, go on walks, listen to fiction, listen to the Word, weep. I am present, noticing the graceful path of the butterflies or the many shapes of the clouds. Other times, I dissociate – my mind disconnected from my body, frozen, far away.
Some days God is so near that I see his smile as he holds me. Other times, he seems gone.
I am not journaling. I am not writing much. I create a schedule. Then things happen and we can’t stick to it. I feel jittery. I have knots in my stomach. Depression comes, and waves of fear threaten to keep me underwater longer than I can sustain. Panic hits. Then calm joy. I do laundry, cook simple meals, buy frozen pizza, let my daughter make breakfast.
I hold my husband’s hand, wanting to feel his nearness and the comfort and relief that I often experience when we are close. I will for things to get better, for nothing to get worse, but there is no guarantee.
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My sisters-in-law and I got a tattoo this past week. It is a delicate floral bouquet of three poppies, with the stem of the bouquet being John 11:25-26, “I am the resurrection and the life.” We got it in honor of one of them as she will soon likely be with Jesus.
I love so many things about this tattoo, how poppies can be significant to the three of us in different ways: home, life forever, joy, spring, the risen Christ. I love, too, how the three poppies are connected to the verse, as if to show how we too find our life in the truth that Christ is our life.
I think about how I am always in Christ, always rooted to him and inside of him. Even when I don’t feel like myself, even when I am numb and on a rollercoaster of grief. I am never just me, but always me in him. And so there is no shame in all these moments that I am barely functioning. Because those moments are not only part of my humanity but also where I take from Jesus “life and rest and joy and peace.”[1] There is strength, supernatural strength, hidden in Christ for me for every single moment – whether I am panicking, or full of grief, or perplexed. It is in those moments, then, where I experience not only that I am in him, but also that he is in me.
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A friend texted me recently, “I hope you can feel Jesus carrying the yoke with you.” Meditating on that the other night, I had this picture of all these burdens that are SO BIG and SO HEAVY, all of them on Jesus’ back. He was carrying them, and I saw that he was carrying us too. All of a sudden I felt lighter because I saw how all of it was on him… not really on me.
Not only is my life – my whole displaced, grieving, hopeful, trauma-filled, healing life – rooted in him, but it is also sustained and held and kept by him. I don’t know how much longer this season of affliction will last. I don’t know how much more it will feel like life is unraveling.
But I have been so grateful these last few weeks for the gift of being able to fall apart inside of Christ. And how that is how he makes me whole. This may be the year when I wasn’t able to keep it all together, when life fell apart and I couldn’t fix it – for my husband, for my kids, for my life overseas, in some key relationships – and I found that I was still okay.
Friend, Christ is all around me, all around you: inside us, beneath us, behind and ahead. The storms of destruction are raging, but we are not consumed…just simply and always held.
[1] From the hymn, “Tis How Sweet To Trust in Jesus”
