I haven’t blogged in three months and I’m not proud of this.
The last time you heard from me I had sore legs from hiking and was reading really good books in the mountains of Colorado. That was one wonderfully restorative vacation and I needed every second of it. I read the last post I wrote on August 1st, and thought about how much has happened in the past three months. It was a good thing I took advantage of the hikes, the books, the family time, the quiet, because I came home and the whirlwind began. I decided to stop talking, step back, and listen. You can learn a lot in the silence, and in many ways listening was also restorative. It brought me to a place of realizing that I know very little, and control even less.
I don’t really know the best way to condense the last three months, but here’s what I think I’ve learned:
1) If your 17 year-old cat has become skin and bones and is limping around the house howling, she is trying to tell you that her time on earth is done and she would like for you to help her cross over to the other side. Our old cat Mattie died about six weeks after we returned from Colorado. Honestly, we’re not cat people and she’s the only one we’ll probably every own (please, Lord), but we had grown fond of her presence, if for no other reason that she stubbornly maintained her place as the senior pet and she didn’t take any crap from the dogs. I liked her grit and tenacity. When it was time to go, she let us know, but we were dense and mostly irritated with her crankiness so we didn’t take the hint. I won’t go into the details, but things got messy with her bowel functions, which was the catalyst for realizing that her nine lives were up. So Kyle and Colin loaded her up and took her to the cat doc and they did that thing they do. I still miss her.
2) When the college graduate comes home to live because he doesn’t have a job, it’s not the end of the world. I always pictured this as a kind of depressing scenario, filled with tension and someone feeling a sense of failure. But now I know better. He’s been under our roof for a reason, and the truth is I don’t know how we would have made it through the last three months without him living in our house. And while we’ll all be thrilled when he is able to get the job and the funds to be on his own, this will happen when it is supposed to happen, and I don’t wring my hands over it or wonder what people are thinking. He does his own laundry, likes leftovers (we eat a lot of these), plans movie nights, and helps in the family business. More about that later.
3) Change happens just when you least expect it, but always when God plans it. Kyle and I have had big job changes. We both find ourselves leading nonprofits – mine small and new, his large and established. We didn’t expect to be in these roles, but here we are. And I could give you a separate list of what we are learning in the midst of this journey, but the biggest lesson comes in the form of a boat, and a thread. Here it is: When the storm is raging and we’re not sure how things are going to turn out, we keep reminding ourselves that God is in the boat. And even if we know this in our heads, our hearts sometimes are just hanging on by a thread of faith. But that gets us to the next day where we just keep putting one foot in front of the other.
I love journey stories, which is why I seem to write so often about loss, lessons, and God. That seems to be the recurring cycle for me on this journey. I experience loss, learn the lessons, and find God again in the midst of it.
So, I guess I’m done being silent. Thanks for hanging in there with me. It’s good to be back.
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