Why I graciously thank 2008…
Why I believe in 2009…
I
I already love 2009...and in all honesty, I love 2008 for the fruits of the journey. I just spent the last month gathering, seeing, listening and fulfilling. I am sorry I have not been here. 40 days or so ago, something humongous happened and my whole heart wanted to honor it and let it take as long as it needed to take to put it into words. I didn’t trust at first that it would last…I thought it was just another little break inside of this difficulty. It was an end and it was a beginning and once I saw that, every day something new opened up that took all of my energy to SEE, or rather, I CHOSE to give the SEEing and the LISTENING all of my energy. It has been the most exquisite experience….beautiful and spectacular and quite pain-filled too…but that’s so much a part of it. This has been a long road....and I have struggled so much, trying to get back to "normal"- I finally realized that life is never "normal"...and I also realized that to avoid feeling the yuckiness, I had turned off seeing and feeling almost everything. I am done doing that. I WANT TO SEE AND FEEL EVERYTHING that comes....that's what life is about.
In the last 40 days of 2008, I have painted, written, rested, connected with my whole real self and connected again deeply with my family. I felt every one of those experiences…I stopped and was able to see those experiences for the incredible miracles that they are. I have been making goals and plans. I have organized almost every part of my life and I can feel again, I can see again. I can feel and see things that I have not been able to for so long. This has taken all of the energy of my body and soul to get through, but I am so glad that it happened.
Are now or have you ever been in a place right now where you can see and feel almost nothing? You don’t even know what is helping you breathe, but something is. You are surviving. You can not see or feel, because if you could, it would just be too traumatic and overwhelming. I just want you to know that you can get through it, you will make it….someday you will be thankful that you could not see or feel all of it until you are ready. Our bodies are so smart, so intuitive, so protective. I want you to know that you will feel again someday, you will SEE again. And seeing and feeling after not feeling or seeing is SO MUCH MORE INCREDIBLE than never knowing what it’s like to not be able to see or feel.
For years I have felt like our life has been in a figurative Intensive Care Unit. It started some time in 2004 and like every length of time spent in that kind of place, it was so terrorizing at first, and then, after years like that…you just start getting way too used to it. You even start to see it as your plan…and you are afraid to live any other way, you are afraid to unhook the life support and see if you can breathe on your own. Picture with me for a minute this analogy….because I know for sure you can relate to it on some level….if not now, some other time in your life. Life is like that…sometimes our entire existence, our marriage or our business or our family life…it’s on life support and we are simply kneeling beside it, praying for it to live…or some things we are praying to finally just die.
There’s so much I want to tell you about being in the Intensive Care Unit of life…but today I want to talk about being OUT of it.
We have had good days, when we could go for a walk out in the gardens of life, still attached to an I.V. or something…but seems like we always had to promptly go back to that room to ultimately be able to survive. Seems like so much was sick….mostly my husband, but that transferred to so many other parts of our life. Our life had to get hooked up for a nonstop connection to God and others to even be able to breathe. And that is ok…but I know for sure that life is meant to be enjoyed and not merely endured. God gives us our own lungs to breathe in and out of, He gives us everything we need…even Intensive Care Units when we can’t do it on our own.
We came back from Africa mid-November, and I was expecting this to be a short stint of wonderful-ness….but I woke up a few days after being in our own bed and I knew for sure that our time in the Intensive Care Unit was over. I knew FOR SURE. I could see it, I could feel it, I could hear it. I could hear the words over and over…”IT IS TIME, IT IS TIME, IT IS TIME” It was as if all of the doctors and nurses were helping us fold our things, gather our flower bouquets and escort us down to our cars. It was time to go home. And this was a different kind of goodbye. There have been lots of times when I could have gone home alone….lots and lots. But, my husband has not been ready. November of 2008, we walked out of there together…both ready to take on our life….. we were TRULY AND WHOLLY together and I have learned after almost 20 years of being with this man, that I can be ready for anything if he is beside me.
Are you an Intensive Care Unit right now? Have you been in one before? Do you remember the day you walked out and saw the sky and the trees and the flowers and the snow-covered mountains, and your kid’s freckles, and the way fire dances in your fireplace? Do you remember what it felt like to see past 6 inches in front of your face? Do you remember what it felt like to pull yourself out of your own all-consuming mess and started to see others, to see people you love, to see other human beings trying to survive or thriving wholly the way you wish you could…to really SEE them, to SEE the world and God’s order, the way the sun always rises and it always sets.
MY GOODNESS WHAT AN EXPERIENCE!!! Life is full of so much beauty. Everything in God’s creation is so magical….and part of the magic is that everything has opposition….to feel the good, we have to feel the pain. To see the beauty, we have to see the ugliness. To feel the warmth, we have to know the cold. To truly experience the light, we must know the darkness. I can finally say that I am thankful for every single thing that we have been through. When you get to the other side of walking through Hell…and you slam that door behind you, what is in front of you has MORE COLOR, MORE LIGHT and MORE HAPPINESS than any of us could even imagine. And there’s still pain, and there’s still dark times, there’s still cold experiences. BUT….when you turn yourself off to the pain, or life experiences turn off your feelings and your eyes so that you can not feel or see the pain…the rest of it goes too. We have to feel all of it. And, life takes on such an enormous meaning when we can do this.
The trick is FOCUS…what we FOCUS on….focus on the beauty and the light and the warm and the blessings……the rest of it will always be there, the yucky stuff will be there to help us see the enormous wonderment of the good stuff. What if we didn’t know the difference? Life would be so dull and bland.
I know there are times in life when we can only breathe, and not much more. There’s a part of us that wants to see and feel….but we can not imagine how we could ever see and feel all that’s around us. If you need to connect to God’s life support, DO IT! But don’t be afraid when it is time to walk outside of that Life Support room and live in the world again…because God is there too….you know He is. He wants so much for you.
I knew for sure that we were OUT of that hospital room FOR GOOD a week before Christmas….I was up at 5am writing (I have written volumes of journals the last 40 days)…..I heard my husband getting up and dressed. It had snowed nearly a foot that night and it was so beautiful and magical…I was sitting by the fireplace….he came over to me all bundled in snow clothes and kissed me and walked out into the dark of dawn in his big work boots…..he went to his parent’s house and got their tractor and I could hear him driving back to our neighborhood. I watched him out the window for the next 5 hours as he scraped the snow off of the driveway of every neighbor and every street in our neighborhood before most of them were even out of bed. If you ever knew my husband before his accident, and what’s happened after, you know that this means HE REALLY IS BACK. He then came inside and played with the kids, planning a backpacking trip with the boys, and even setting up their scout tent in the bonus room and let them sleep in it til Christmas…it was such a good day. Every day has brought new miracles. I finally trust that this is real.
So we sit here in our rental house, seeing the life we had before all of this as a pile shrapnel and wood chips, I can’t even distinguish it….we are starting over…..but HOLY MOLEY is this awesome. I love life.
AND I AM BACK TOO……I really am. Watch out world…the Ross’s are ready to take on 2009…together.
HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!
xoxoxoxo
Melody Ross
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