One Week in the Woods

We have been living in our new home for one week. The second day I was here my sister was packing up her things to leave after she and her daughter drove over to help unpack. When she walked back to the house before leaving I thought she had forgotten something. Instead she had become worried about leaving me standing in my cardboard-strewn home, in the middle of the woods, alone. We cried as she left and I listened to her car drive away up our dirt and gravel driveway until she turned onto the highway.

The next day I was momentarily overcome by joy as I stepped out our garage door with my 10-month-old German shepherd, Zoey, and was in the woods immediately. The beauty here with a softly-flowing, bubbling stream, surrounded by evergreens and moss and spring wildflowers, is a creation of God’s I quickly became lost within. Yesterday Zoey even stumbled upon two shed deer antlers and I gleefully said to her, “Look what we found!”

When we return home an hour or so later, Zoey hops up into her new dog bath and already seems resigned to a daily scrub down if she is to have her fun running back and forth through the water, the woods, the mud and the moss. Like all my shepherds before her, she stays right by my side most of the time. She loves to run as fast as she can across the forest floor, adept at avoiding tree limbs and gnarled roots. With a whistle, she runs right back to check on me before circling around the trees that reach skyward, sniffing out animals that passed through earlier and picking up sticks and dropping them as she becomes quickly distracted by a fluttering leave.

Unfortunately, even here in the woods, fear and anger do not leave me for long. In a brand new home there are dozens of brand new gadgets. I have quickly become frustrated at finding the TV shows that I like to watch. There are too many buttons and arrows. It has only been a year since I became partially skilled at handling the TV in our last home, and then only because my husband moved away and my last son left for college. How easy it had become to let others do for me until no one else was around.

When my son Eric does offer to show me how to use something, like our induction stovetop or the convection feature on the full-sized double ovens, I tell him I am too distracted, busy, frazzled and fried to learn. When pressed, I relent, only to discover that I don’t need to be an engineer or teenager to learn the controls, this time.

Sometimes it is funny when my husband and I lose yet one more item in our home because it was shoved at the last minute in a random box or put away in a drawer we have forgotten exists. Most of the time, though, it causes me to obsess with anger and single-mindedness until I either locate the item or give up in tears in the corner of the basement.

Today is the first day I have not unpacked, put away, sorted or sifted. Instead, I went “into town” to get some groceries. When I was ready to check out the woman behind the register asked me if I had found everything I needed. I told her I would be happy to list all of the items I couldn’t find if only she would be able to do something about it.

Here in the woods, one day by one day, I aim to work to be happy enough even if I don’t find everything I need and even if there is nothing I can do about it.

 

Lessons on Leaving

Lessons on Leaving

Now that I am mere days away from moving, I am ready to reflect on the lessons I’ve learned about leaving. And they have been, for better or worse, a learning experience in hope, fear, love and loss.

This journey began close to two years ago when my husband left, lost, and stayed too long at a job he once loved. My husband is nothing if not extremely resilient and never, ever have I seen him become defeated – not when he began a new job search, not when his job coach died in the midst of his search, not when his wife again and again and again broke down in fear.

On a Thursday, five months after his former job ended, Tom was offered a new job in a new city; they wanted him to start on Tuesday. He was in his truck on his way home from a second interview when he called to tell me. I couldn’t speak for the words caught in my throat. “Tuesday? They want you to start on Tuesday?”

A day earlier, a normal Wednesday, I was securely living my life with my husband nearby and I had grown used to his company. Then he moved away.

But a short time later I had one son home and then two and I relished playing the stay-at-home mom to my beloved boys, minus carpools and powerlifting meets and dinners strung together with tape and glue. They were company when I needed it and help when I asked for it, but when the days grew shorter and boxes piled higher, I knew the end of my last summer in this home was coming to an end.

As Son Number One drove away in his car and Son Number Two was driven away by his dad’s side I watched with one little dog in my arms and another sitting obediently by my side.

Life is loss and though I have likely been spared much more than most, each time there is a little and a little more, I cling a little more tightly to what is left. And just as me, and what I felt I had left, were finished adjusting to just the three of us: small dog, big dog and me, big dog died. But not before biting me and taking with him not just a part of my ear but another chunk of what was left.

I rebounded just a bit and people swooped in on me and called me “resilient” and “brave” and “full of courage.” That’s what people do when they see you struggle but regain your footing sometime later.

As 2015 turned to 2016 I chose a word for my new year and it was “do.” First on my list of to-do’s, and, lately, it seems like the last thing as well, is packing. Because when you are making a move there is stuff to pack and clean and change and push and shove out a quickly-closing door.

And so finally, now that people are asking me exactly when it is I am moving I am finding that it feels a little like I am already gone. Because a year ago I let my fear and loss, bury my hope and love. When I am afraid people will leave me or pull away, it’s easier if I just do it myself. And so I did. Because I don’t like to linger because it hurts too much and I am always sure that I know what will happen and that it won’t be good.

Former City Girl, meet Country Girl. I am always free to take what I’ve lost and make it something new. We all are. So here I go moving from a non-acre home to more than 60 acres with a home built just a wee bit on the rustic side with logs lining my living room and stone stretching to the ceiling.

I can be no more lost or lonely on lots of land than I am on little land. When hope and love seems hard to find and accept and draw through the blood-filled veins of your life, it’s the same no matter where you live. Do a new thing, do the thing I don’t think I can do. New thing, hard thing, thing I need to learn to do, here we go….

Faith: Friend or Foe

Most of us go through so many storms in our lives that were we to question God's love or existence at each one we would be faithless and rootless in the middle of the ocean. 

I have been faking it for some time now. Certainly I felt the slow slide to the land of unbelief when I left my volunteer activities at my last church over three years ago. Soon my attendance at Sunday services became spotty and because eventually I knew we would be moving to another city, I knew pulling away would be inevitable, and so chalked it up as necessary. No matter, I continued my daily devotionals and Bible readings and still do, though mostly it is along the order of taking my vitamins, wearing a seatbelt and not eating expired food.

As a year and then two went by, I picked up just one book about how I could learn to become more positive, change my ways and succeed in life, minus the word of God. And then it was two, and three. At first I told myself I was challenging myself to find God in the midst of words that never proclaimed the importance of Christ in one's life. After a while I stopped working at it entirely.

As my life before me feels more and more out of my control I am relying less and less, OK, not at all, on  God. I feel him there like some distant uncle who I never talk to but perhaps, if I need something, he will answer. But mostly I am not counting on it.

The saying that if God feels distant it's not him that moved, it's you, has never been more true. I don't doubt that God hasn't moved but I keep inching further away and now I am sure, should I be fortunate to face God some day he will look me in the eyes and say "I know you not."

When I first began volunteering with secular organizations I waited for someone to start and end the meeting in prayer, out of habit, because that is what I had become accustomed to. And then I just felt relieved that no one was going to call on me, the suckiest prayer of all time, to pray. Most meetings that I spent at church I struggled to even be fully present since I was sure at some point I was going to be called onto pray or called onto bring God more relevantly into my words or called onto remember a Bible verse that I did not have memorized. Maybe I brought this judgement on myself, but the stress that has been relieved at not having this expectation in the meetings and volunteer activities I am involved in now, is enormous. 

People have told me I need to practice if I am to become a better prayer. So I did practice and I did offer to pray and I did do it in the privacy of my own home. Nope, I have not become better and I still suck at it and I am still uncomfortable at it. And now I just feel like a failure and if I can't learn to pray, regardless of how often I read the Bible or practice, then I just plain suck. You can tell me that God doesn't care, but never, sitting in a meeting at church, have I ever heard someone say, "No thanks, I am not comfortable praying aloud, and have the whole team say, "hey, no worries." 

In attempting to work this through for myself over the years I have read books about prayers; I have used acronyms to help me cover the essentials of prayers; and I have asked people I know who do pray with beauty and heartfelt words how they do it. I have never come away with an answer. Because people who do pray well, don't have the answers. I just see them as better Christians or closer to God or whatever. And me as someone who will never be good enough.

Further, the more I draw away from God, the angrier I become and the more I dislike myself because angry people breed hate, and bitter words and resentment and who really wants to be around that? I know I don't so I don't even want to be around myself. But I am stuck with me. Now when I get stuck in traffic or my computer crashes for the fourth time in a week and I am stuck in one more line at Best Buy waiting for an appointment with a person who doesn't even have my name spelled right,  or my seventh psychiatrist leaves and I will never find another, or my new dog comes to me with ringworm and giardia and nasal infections and just plain pisses me off, I am useless to anyone.

And though I wish I could, I can't help thinking that this all began the day I wanted to belong to the kingdom of God and to His people and to be loved for who I am: a human being whose sins were forgiven by a man on a cross who gave his life so I could live mine.  But mostly I just feel inadequate  with my fellow believers and so if you find I'm avoiding you, this is why. 

So today my prayer is simply this: Dear God, I am not mad at you and I have not lost faith. But I am mad at your people and I am mad at this world. If you were able to soften your heart and love us enough to let yourself hang on a cross with nails through your body, maybe, just maybe, I will soften enough someday to stop being mad at your people and forget that I am imperfect in my words for you. Until that time, I am crawling, one inch at a time, back to you.