Losing Hope and Giving Birth
"You look tired," he says when he walks in the door. I feel a pang of guilt, and then tell him the truth: "I was just crying on the phone." He asks me was it my friend? Or was it me? "It was me," I say. And then it's another hour before we're sitting at the dinner table with time to say more. A friend once told me I was a graceful crier, silent tears, choked voice—she compared it to her own wracking sobs, snot-filled, red-faced. Sometimes I wish I could cry like that, it would feel more serious. My personal challenge for the month of June is to engage my emotions. I am well-versed in knowing my emotions, the full spectrum of them, talking about them, exploring them, but it is a rare day when I actually engage them. My counselor in Colorado would ask me how I felt about something and I would tell her what I thought instead. We rammed against this wall regularly. I only know how to approach an emotion by thinking through it.
A few days ago we're sitting in a doctor's office waiting room. He rushed home from work, his dress shirt feeling uncomfortably tight. I'm wearing a t-shirt and gym shorts, the uniform of a stay at home wife whose days run dangerously mindlessly into one another. He catches himself about to say something critical (he's had a long day; we're certain we're going to get more bad news; it's hot outside; they didn't check us in properly) and I say something along the lines of the danger in being two internal processors married to one another is we're more likely to bury all the bad things than slough our way through them. I don't say it well, though, and I think we misunderstand one another. Another danger of internal processors: we say less than what's helpful instead of more.
We sit at the dinner table talking through my tears, his day, our year. We circle the same bushes we've been circling since we left our home and community in Texas. The same burning bushes friends have pointed out whenever they come visit for five days or ten. Beside those visits, though, no one has pointed to our marriage or our lives in a year with an eye toward hope. We left our home on June 25 and walked into triage. We watched my body bleed and a policeman bleed and our finances bleed and our new church bleed and our hope bleed and there was no stopping any of it. We bled ourselves out and now we're shells of the people we were a year ago.
Neither of us feel at home here, we feel adrift, at sea, without anchor. He reminds me last night of the words in Jeremiah: "Thus says the Lord of hosts, the God of Israel, to all the exiles whom I have sent into exile from Jerusalem to Babylon: Build houses and live in them; plant gardens and eat their produce. Take wives and have sons and daughters; take wives for your sons, and give your daughters in marriage, that they may bear sons and daughters; multiply there, and do not decrease. But seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare."
He reminds me we're called to be faithful here, for however long the Lord has us in this home, in this city, in this state. Even if we feel like exiles, even if we feel bled out. Nine long months stretch ahead of us in this lease and I am no stranger to moving often. It take nine months to grow a child and that child can change the world, surely we can gestate our hopes and longings and fears and birth something beautiful in that time too?
Every morning he sends me a verse or prayer or a quote he reads on his train ride into the city. I wake on the couch every day, having moved there in the still dark morning hours after he kisses me goodbye. I wake to the verse or prayer or quote and think about it all day. This morning he sends me this:
“It seemed like a dream, too good to be true, when GOD returned Zion’s exiles. We laughed, we sang, we couldn’t believe our good fortune. We were the talk of the nations—“GOD was wonderful to them!” GOD was wonderful to us; we are one happy people.
And now, GOD, do it again—bring rains to our drought-stricken lives so those who planted their crops in despair will shout hurrahs at the harvest. So those who went off with heavy hearts will come home laughing, with armloads of blessing.” Psalm 126:1-6 MSG
I cry, snot-filled and red-faced. I cry.
