Unraveling

When my dad passed away, I spent a lot of time thinking about vapor and smoke and life drifting away. Now that six weeks have slipped by, I find myself thinking less about life being gone and more about life being inescapable.

If my life were made of thread, then I would surely be unraveling.

Hard News To Take

With the exception of dry cleaning yet to be dropped off, today I finally put away the rest of my stuff from my unexpected, mid-September trip home. I even cleaned the house. Really cleaned.

Stranger things have happened.

My father is gone. While this may not be news to my friends and family, it will be news to the virtual world of blogging and those virtual friends who have become a part of my life. I have avoided making this world-wide-web announcement simply because the act of putting it to print makes it that much more real.

As if the obituary sitting beside me is not real enough.

A day or two before I packed my bag to head home, I asked the husband how in the world I was suppose to prepare for life without my dad. He had no words because, after all, there are no words to make such a devastating reality bearable. He simply held me tight and told me I was the strongest person he knew.

Which is so not true.

Alongside my mom and only brother, I spent eleven days with my dad before he gave up the fight and set his compass north toward heaven. Those eleven days were the hardest, sweetest, and most confusing days of my life. I watched a man who had always been larger than life to me succumb to the bitter disease known as cancer. Only four months he lasted from the day of the diagnosis.

Four months.

And that's all I can say about that.

Cornerstones of my dad's resting place. Always Mr. Big in our hearts.

It's hard enough finding the courage to write.

Baby steps.

Surrender That Ship!

Well, we're gonna go ahead and knock a few things out of the way. I've got a stack of school work and lesson plans and bills to work my way through and anyone who properly knows me understands that the key to procrastination is taking care of things now that could be taken care of later.

Or something like that.

To even stand a chance of getting around to what really needs to be accomplished today, I must first take some virtual time to think about one of my new favorite quotes. Consider this,

When I meet a wind I cannot fight,

I can do naught but set my sails

To let it take me where it will.

That is taken from a book I've been reading called The Rose Garden. It's not a bad read, but I won't give it my full recommendation until I finish it. If it ends in a way that makes me want to throw my nook across the room, well... it will fall short from getting my five stars. That particular quote, however, caught my attention and made me pause what I was reading the other night to write it down. In the last thirty-six hours or so, I've been thinking about the truth and wisdom steeped in those words.

How many times have I fought that wind? How many times have I grown weary from struggling with the sails and fighting the current and cursing the direction it is taking me? How many times have I given up the fight, exhausted, after coming to the conclusion that there really is no fighting that kind of wind. The course before me has been set and no matter how hard I may try to steer it the other way, I only end up losing time and energy and find myself right back to that original course.

If that makes any sense at all.

Today I am thankful for the course that has been set especially for me. This thought brings to mind Psalm 139:16 (The Message):

Like an open book,

 You watched me grow from conception to birth;

All the stages of my life were spread out before You,

The days of my life prepared before
 I had even lived one day.

God has answered my prayers more than once in the midst of strong winds in which I have no control. He steers the ship with His very breath even while I doubt His direction. Without Him, I would have surely perished already by my own hand. No, that is not a suicidal thought... it's a factual statement. My ways and my thoughts and my plans would have already been my own demise. Do you get that? We were never meant to survive on our own. We were meant to follow the plans of a perfect Creator.

So anyway.

That's what has been on my mind and now that my peace has been said, I can move on to those other things like presentations and state standards and electric payments.

Then again,

It might not be a bad time to mop the kitchen floor.

Awkward Silence

I went to bed last night around midnight only to stare at the ceiling for the next five hours. During that time, I (mentally) wrote a (brilliant) blog post entitled Everything I Can Do You Can Do Better. It had just the right amount of humor mixed with just the right amount of truth to let you, the reader, know that I, like you, grow weary of people who always have done the exact same thing you have done, just with a little more drama involved.

It truly is exhausting.

Unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which side of the fence you sit on), I was not motivated in the least to actually get out of bed to put my thoughts to print. Instead, I perfected the grammar, tweaked a few punch lines, and rolled over while congratulating myself on a job well done. As the darkness of the room took on the gray tones of dawn, I drifted off to sleep only to dream about tornadoes and death for the second night in a row.

It's been tough around here, people.


(this is where the awkward silence comes in)


I honestly have nothing else to say.
Nothing inspirational. Nothing witty.

It'll hit me around three in the morning.


Except for this,


For my thoughts are not your thoughts, 
Neither are your ways My ways, says the Lord.

For as the heavens are higher than the earth,
So are My ways higher than your ways
And My thoughts higher than your thoughts.

For as the rain and snow come down from the heavens,
And return not there again, but water the earth
And make it bring forth and sprout...

So shall My word be that goes forth out of My mouth:
It shall not return to Me void (without producing any effect)
But it shall accomplish that which I please and purpose
And it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it.

Isaiah 55: 8-11



I love it when He gets the last word. =)

Storm Chaser

Today I will make my fourth road trip in four days. I am not kidding when I say I'm a little tired of my beloved little car. I actually let it sit quietly for three solid days last week and stayed put in the house with the pajama-and-no-make-up kinda look. Afterall, I had just put a little over two thousand miles on it for the month of June alone. July is not looking much different... I might be relieved when school starts up again. If nothing else, my gas tank (wallet!) can take a breather.

All this traveling. All those highways and interstates and lonesome little towns miles off the nearest exit. I may very well have memorized every Starbucks with easy on-and-off access on both sides of the Mississippi. I've seen accidents and broke-down cars and highway patrols with their flashing lights. I've maneuvered the madness of the big cities and scoffed at the ignorance of the GPS.

And, boy, have I been through some storms.

Rain I can handle. Torrential downpours, I cannot.

High wind.
Thunder.
Lightning.

The screeching of a tornado siren?

Sheesh. I've dealt with it all in the last month on the road. This last time, just a few days ago, had me praying my usual on-the-road-in-the-middle-of-a-downpour kind of prayer:

Lord, break these clouds up. Split the storm in half. Calm the wind.

He can do that, right?

But here's the deal, He has rarely done that... for me anyway. I mean, seriously. Why can't He just pull the plug on the lightning cord and put the funnel cloud back in its pen? I know He can do it. I've reminded Him of this on several occasions. Even the other day, when my nerves were shot and my eyes blurry from focusing on the yellow line when I could see absolutely nothing else on a southeastern interstate in the middle of the afternoon and going a whopping fifteen miles per hour...

Come on, Lord. Is this necessary?

It was when I finally saw blue sky and sunshine before me and looked in my rearview mirror to see the dark and stormy clouds behind me that He spoke to my heart,

I did not take the storm away from you, but I did bring you through it.

Well, I can't argue with that. These storms in life... they threaten to tear us down, to choke the very life from us, to ultimately stop the work that God has begun. We've all been through 'em. We'll all go through 'em. Storms are a part of this life both in the natural and spiritual world in which we live. But if these storms have taught me anything, it is the very fact that I am still standing.

And so are you.

Hang on to the One who will outlast every storm. No, He doesn't always stop them. More times than naught it seems He lets them play out until the very last roar of thunder dwindles down to a faint whimper in the sky. And yes, there is no hiding the devastation that is sometimes left behind. Storms have a way of tearing things up and leaving us with the clean up, kinda like the tantrum of a two-year old in the middle of the Walmart candy aisle (extreme example, I know, but I've got visions of reality tv in my head that will never go away).

God is good even when our circumstances are not, and yes, my dear girl...  He does have a plan. Even when it makes no sense, there is something greater unfolding. For now, though,  I've got to gas up that tank and hit the road again, but you can bet on one thing,

I'll be checking that forecast. =)





For He [God] Himself has said,
I will not in any way
Fail you nor give you up nor leave you without support.
I will not, I will not, I will not in any degree
Leave you helpless nor forsake you nor let down.

-last part of Hebrews 13:5, Amplified

1992

Psst...

It's late and I'm tired and this particular post tends to bounce all over the place. Good luck. =)

The year was 1992.

My hair was short. My glasses big. My dreams way out there.

I was freshly arrived at my new duty station and ready to show the parents my new world. My grandma even made the trip to see me and my new digs. Thinking back on it now, there was no way in h-e-double-hockey-stick that I even remotely had a clue what I was doing, but hey... in my mind I was on top of the world.

Or, in the case of this picture, on top of a mountain.

I am not entirely sure what month this picture was taken. It had to have been late summer or early fall. What is for certain is that in less than a year after this Kodak moment was captured, my last name would be changed and my dad would no longer be the only man in my life. For the time being, however, he was the man and probably the one I most wanted to impress. In some ways, that has not changed one bit.

Father's Day was yesterday and in my usual way of doing most things, I thought about life and family and what it all means. My dad has been diagnosed with a dirty word in a dirty stage that I refuse to talk about too much at this point in time. I don't like it one bit. I especially don't like how time has suddenly become an issue. It frustrates me and my comforting habit of always watching a clock.

Tick. Tock.
Tick. Tock.
Tick. Tock.

As if tock is even a word.

At any rate, I was thinking about my dad yesterday and scrolling through pictures of us together. There's not a lot, but enough to make me smile. Strangely enough, I don't have many pictures of my mom and me. Why is that moms are usually not in the picture? And selfies don't count, by the way. Posting a zillion pics of you with your kid using a minimum of two filters to get the right look of "you" does not fool any of us into thinking that picture is all about your kid--

But I digress (as usual).

My dad has always cheered me on. In a scrap album tucked away in a cedar chest is a card that he sent to me following the trip in which this picture was taken. Among other things, it simply says, "I'm proud of you." He still says that often and I gotta admit, I never grow tired of hearing it. If anything, our recent turn of events has just made me appreciate it all the more.

I always knew I had a good dad.
I always knew I was fortunate.

May the ticking of the clock always remind us to cherish yesterday and anticipate tomorrow. May we never grow weary of spending time with the ones we love. And may mountain-top memories always remind us that if even for a brief moment in time, we really were on top of the world.

Or something like that.

Happy Belated Father's Day to the men who make dreams seem possible. Even if we never reach them, they're the ones who always believed we could.

Yappers Not Allowed

My last post a few weeks ago was about change.

This one is all about reality.

My current view includes a steady rain falling outside. Even though I am on a third floor, I am eye-level with a roof and the raindrop landing in puddles on tar paper (what it reminds me of, anyway) is a bleak and boring sight. My brother sits in front of me diligently working a sudoko puzzle book- he taps his forehead with his pen every now and then thinking through the numbers. My mom left a bit ago with the daughter in tow. My dad naps quietly in a bed only to be rudely awakened every now and then by the LOUD lady across the hall.

If you're gonna skype, woman, at least shut the door and turn your mouth down a notch.

Seriously, a hospital is no place to rest. The employees are louder than the patients (with the exception of skype-lady across the way). They joke in the hallways about their weekend antics and trade recipes while the rest of us try to accept the new reality that has just slammed into our otherwise quiet lives. Okay... maybe they aren't that annoying. I may be mixing up those voices in my head with the other loudmouths in the cafeteria earlier.

And right on cue, there stands two yappers outside the doorway opening and shutting empty cabinets like a reformed hoarder wondering where all their stuff went.

Sheesh. How did we end up here? A month ago we were preparing to graduate the youngest son and anticipating an upcoming visit from the parents. Now our days are filled with depressing doctor reports and googled statistics and a man who just doesn't feel good.

I suppose I'm just too occupied to be bothered by constant talking that goes absolutely nowhere. Even now, there are stories I could tell from my whirlwind drive home. Stories that include creepy, steel bridges and tornadic thunderstorms, but, really... all of that just seems so fruitless.

Kinda like the lady across the hall worrying about her neighbor's fence.

Yapping gets us nowhere, people.