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Living the
Tuesday's Trust
“All I have seen teaches me to trust the creator for all I have not seen.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
towards the end of his life
after losing his father when he was 7,
his first wife when she was 20
and his first son, aged 5.
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Oh the "joys" of Griefdom: the hyper-startled response, the panic, the fears of losing a loved one again, the lack of any emotional reserve, the instability of one’s emotions…
As I mentioned to my doctor today when I went for my annual exam, it’s like I am only 10% here; the other 90% is preoccupied working through the convoluted grief process, and I have nothing else available for anyone else, or even to be self-aware. Then I relayed to her the saga of my triple-bone-breakage of my pelvis. She agreed, and understood that’s the way of grief…
As it turns out, there are even more ways to be traumatized from the lack of emotional resources left as grief continually wrings you out…
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This weekend, Tommy and I each went through an extreme panic — sequentially — when each of us, individually, thought we were losing one another. We each regressed emotionally, and unfortunately —at the same time— so that we even could not be there emotionally for one another.
Tommy was the drummer for a band in a very nice nightclub here in Knoxville this past weekend; I was in the audience to watch him, but I got terribly triggered by volatile events happening before me and became extremely fearful, so I withdrew into the nightclub’s restroom.
When Tommy and his band took their break, he could not find me anywhere in the nightclub. After looking everywhere throughout the club, all he could think was that I had walked down the city streets alone, and that something bad had happened to me.
I was so traumatized from my fears, I did not even think Tommy might be thinking I had left the restaurant. Of necessity, I was isolating myself to try to reach some state of stabilization from my own panic.
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When Tommy found me, he was panicked, but I was still panicked as well, so we were of no use to one another emotionally… We were stymied, both traumatized, both needing to retreat to home to work through this, but stuck because Tommy had the obligations of his gig to fulfill…
We had no idea how we would work through our traumas to come out anywhere near healthy on the other side. But we had faith and trust that our Heavenly Father, our “Abba” Daddy, could create solutions for us, and that He did.
Tommy got through the last set and we were able to go to our place of safety to sort through the emotional morass.
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But “what Satan meant for evil, God used for good.”
We’ve spent the last few days celebrating the life of one another. With God’s help, we sorted through what had been going on with each of us. When our concurrent traumas could have caused great divisiveness, God enabled us to speak the truth in love to one another instead. Now there is a sweeter closeness than ever before. We are so grateful we didn’t lose one another…
The Creator God is so uniquely creative that He takes situations beyond our control and works His miracle from the horrible events. What a good God we serve. What an amazing God we serve. How sweet the life lived under His shadow, and under the wing of His protectiveness… Only with Him can we walk through this Valley of the Shadow of Death.
I must always remember that what Satan means for evil, God will use for our ultimate good, and for His eternal glory.
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Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to
live the question.
Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
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When we become aware that we do not have to escape our pains, but that we can mobilize them into a common search for life, those very pains are transformed from expressions of despair into signs of hope.
~Henri Nouwen
No great art has ever been made without the artist having known danger.
~Rainer Maria Rilke
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“The beat of my heart has grown deeper, more active, and yet more peaceful, and it is as if I were all the time storing up inner riches…My [life] is one long sequence of inner miracles.”
~The young Dutchwoman Etty Hillesum
wrote that in a Nazi transit camp in 1943,
on her way to her death at
Auschwitz two months later.
In Japan, the late 18th-century poet Issa (Kobayashi, a haiku poet), is celebrated for his delighted, almost child-like celebrations of the natural world. Issa saw four children die in infancy, his wife die in childbirth, and his own body partially paralyzed.
~Emerson, Hillesum, and Issa Quotes from “The Joy of Less” by Pico Iyer
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Meanwhile, the moment we get tired in the waiting, God's Spirit is right alongside helping us along. If we don't know how or what to pray, it doesn't matter. He does our praying in and for us, making prayer out of our wordless sighs, our aching groans. He knows us far better than we know ourselves, knows our pregnant condition and keeps us present before God. That's why we can be so sure that every detail in our lives of love for God is worked into something good.
Romans 8:26-28 The Message
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May God go with you throughout your grief process, buffering your pain, comforting your hurt, and embracing your heart,
~Quotes from Henri Nouwen and Rainer Maria Rilke from http://thinkexist.com/quotation/have_patience_with_everything_that_remains/339301.html
~Quotes from “The Joy of Less” by Pico Iyer http://happydays.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/the-joy-of-less/
Pictures: question mark: http://www.fotosearch.com/sc/CSP128/k1287141/ man with question mark: http://www.fotosearch.com/IDX025/461550b/
