I loved today's talk at church.
(Not the talk of this original sermon series art used above, this photo just represents what the majority of this post is about there was no way I could not use it.)
But alas, back to today's message. It was on God's intended purposes for marriage and how many of those are lost today, but the parts that struck us the most was when they talked about seasons of marriage, going through spring, summer, fall, and winter and what each of those can represent, occur in the lives of our marriages.
I was finally given words to this thing I have been feeling and trying to articulate and express ever since my most recent discharge from the hospital as few weeks ago due to a recent and unexpected setback with my health.
I have been trying to find words to describe the grief, describe the joy, describe the heaviness, describe the moments where things have felt lighter, describe the deep sadness, describe the sense of heartache and loss that at times has been overpowering, describe the sense of whatever it is that we have been walking through this last month and six days.
An induction into a new season of grief within a current, ongoing season of grief.
Finally, today, words were given to give voice to that which has been eating me alive.
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For the last four and a half years, we've been in winter.
Let me back up, for the second half of today's talk on marriage, Kay Warren joined Rick on stage as they went through four different seasons no marriage will be a stranger to.
Real briefly, as they explained them in the overview:
SPRINGTIME... represents those seasons of busy-ness, where you're running non-stop, the two of you seeing each other is more like ships passing in the night, where it feels like life can't slow down.
SUMMER... as they described, tends to be short in our household... "summer is when things are going well, summer is represented in those seasons where it's easy, it's great, everything is going well, etc."
FALL... is when things change. It's kinda messy, just like the leaves changing and falling to the ground, fall represents those seasons in your marriage when things are changing and it's about how will you adjust or not adjust to those changes.
WINTER... and then winter comes. seasons of winter in your marriage are times of bleak sadness, times of deep loss, we are still in winter, Kay says, and we don't know how long it will last (referencing the loss of their son, Matthew).
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Just hearing about seasons today did something to my heart I can't even articulate.
What I found funny was that for whatever reason, as I've been wrestling with trying to write about and articulate the grief and this new season and the sheer just emotional exhaustion I have felt comparable to how I was even just a month and a half ago or two months ago before this most recent setback.
For whatever reason yesterday, after running into a photo from our honeymoon four years ago in Colorado on Friday that I wouldn't get out of my mind, something within me had me search for the rest of them. The rest of a set of pictures I hadn't looked at or wanted to re-visit in years.
There is something about my honeymoon pictures that now is comforting.
Newly, strangely, oddly comforting as I haven't been able to look, let alone post them for nearly four years.
Some of that has been I just hadn't thought about it or had time, was already backlogged on a million other pictures.
But the other part of it are all the emotions that come up whenever we think about our honeymoon and that period of time, a time that felt like that of a cruel joke, I felt better than I had since I first got sick that March 2010 (this was June 2010), on my wedding day by some sheer miracle and then that continued into our honeymoon.
Maybe this really IS over, let ourselves believe, it almost felt too good to be true.
My body and my capacity seemed it was slowly being restored. Maybe this really would be a fresh start and beginning of a new season for us not only as newlyweds, but two souls already weary from a medical journey they did not choose.
Only for us to come back from our honeymoon and without so much of a moment's notice, find the tentacles of this disease come reaching for us before our car even hit the parking lot. Grief, hardship, and another seemly unending chapter of this season with this dreadful disease was just beginning. Just when we'd thought maybe we were at the end.
When I look back at our honeymoon, much like how I view other periods of our lives the last four and a half years where we've been provided moments of relief, moments that no matter how long or how short or whatever form they would come, this one specifically being our week-long honeymoon, they were moments of respite and relief we so desperately needed.
Those moments and pockets of relief, like someone coming and puncturing tiny holes in a balloon;
letting out some of the air and we feel like ahhh, we can breathe a little, we can breathe right now...
Similar moments, those moments, beginning with this picture, the start of a new season of winter in our lives, yet one of the moments of summer and spring in the midst of this new current winter.
Then just the next day, another moment of respite at our first Mizzou Alumni event here in California.
While we are living in winter, He alone is the One who provides for us light in this present, seemingly unending darkness, streams of life and living water in the desert, and hope. Hope, in the midst of desolation and despair.
He provides, like manna from heaven and streams breaking forth in the desert, times of relief.
We all need relief.
Those pictures were some of those moments. This picture taken in the midst of the beginning of our new season of winter within our winter, were precious moments above the ground and the trenches of the reality of life here in the wilderness and the desert, moments were time seemed to stand still, and for just those moments, everything was okay, everything was at peace, it was well.
I think it's anything but ironic the level of deep joy we were experiencing in this photo and finally being together after a week apart through some of our worst nightmares.
This was when grief, sadness, hardship, and came into our lives in the midst of our already winter, bringing a storm with a strength that left us literally flat on our backs, completely knocked off our feet and overwhelmed by its intensity, a winter storm that came with the strength and power of the current winter we'd already learned to live in.
Moving to California has been part of our respite.
Just like the temperatures here make for a mild "winter," it's still winter in that our problems and my illness and the myriads of ways this still affects our lives, etc have not gone away, but we've been provided a bit of relief from the bitterness of the cold.
I don't mean this literally, but figuratively, its only coincidence that temperature-wise this is true as well.
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STILL IN THE DESERT | I remember numerous times feeling I thought we were finally, FINALLY, entering the promise land, only to find, we are still, we still have miles, years stretching before us of wandering through the wilderness of the desert.
But we have been here once before.
It's like circling around a trail, thinking you're getting back to where you began, meaning you were done and you'd now get to go home or move on to the next thing and then instead of coming up again with the entrance, you come across a clearing that is cloaked in total, utter darkness, it's ten times colder here than it was in some of the darkest coldest nights you recall in the wilderness.
And worst of all, the trail and path that you thought you were coming in close on that you thought was near the beginning and thus your exit, you are met with a sign that says "Now entering Death Valley," temperatures, living conditions: bleak, and instead of being close to the finish, you find you have hundreds, thousands more miles to go.
Yet all you know and see is how much this is like the beginning, as you step into that forest once again, entirely blinded and stunned by the harshness of the winds and the bitter cold cutting through the last bit of exposed skin on your face not wrapped up in etc etc
Knowing you've been that place before, yet things are only just beginning.
A week in right. travel separate paths then finally reunited again, it was still winter, it was still scary, we were still shook up, but the events of the last week have broken, striped and changed us. being united again felt like Christmas.
It didn't matter the temperature, it didn't matter the circumstances or the nightmares of the last week we'd both been through.
All that mattered is that finally, we were together.
And we weren't alone.
And sometimes that is all you need.
That night was a gift of springtime and summer.
As are times we go to the beach.
As are times the nice weather offers a bit of relief, one less thing to worry about, have to suffer, deal with, he's taken out the variable of weather...
But, it is still, winter.
Our honeymoon was what we hoped, the beginning of a new season with my health.
I felt tricked, I felt amazing on my wedding day, on my honeymoon, slowly beginning to let our earned skepticism guard down, maybe, just maybe what the doctors were saying this time was true. maybe this thing really IS over and just like the most recent doctor had said, this should clear up in 6-8 weeks.
Only to be met with this evil monster, grief, and all its companions on our doorstep the minute we came back.
Our dating period seems like a dream.
Yet I'm so glad we had that.
I'm so glad we had a taste of life in the context of our relationship and marriage, where things aren't always as hard as they are now, as they've been the last four and a half years living with chronic illness in our home.
Today as Kay was praying, my eyes filled with tears as i was thinking of the joy and things we experienced in our short dating period that were only supposed to continue into our engagement and our first few years of marriage, yet a bliss and a newness and a spirit of celebrating, a season of summer and spring, a season of rejoicing that we got to experience amidst the hardship and grief but never without it.
Today my heart was reminded of the ways He's done this in the past and made me start a new prayer and resolve to see how He will, in this, in the context of the last four and a half years, begin/continue to restore what the locusts have eaten.
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We longed to be like "normal" couples.
To get to experience the feeling of being newlyweds, while our experience was catapulted to that of an elderly couple, as many of our counselors and mentors and physicians would echo, with me being completely unable to hardly move, let alone be out of the house for more than 15-30 minutes at a time, unable to be on my feet longer than 10 minutes without getting dizzy, unable to drive.
Or go for a walk, like a normal couple, but my body couldn't make it down the street, let alone back.
Instead of newlyweds, we were living the lives of an elderly couple where one of the spouses is now caretaker.
Going through as my counselor would tell me and help me process repeatedly, how many of the things we were dealing with and going through were things that married couples typically experience towards the END of their marriages, yet here we were, having to deal with it in the beginning and in the context of a new marriage.
Just like this image of a tree for Saddleback's "50 Days of Transformation" series from the beginning of the year, while it has still been winter, there have been periods, moments, days, afternoons, sometimes weeks of summer/spring as depicted by the half of the tree to the right. Yet, notice how it is the same, not a different tree.
Just the tree in a different season or aspect within a particular season.
And somehow just seeing and hearing about this today at church, this reality of seasons that have taken on new meaning for us in some of the first and most formative years of our marriage, today, hearing about these seasons especially from those experiencing a winter of their own, reminded me that nothing is wasted, these times and seasons, as difficult as they are to live and walk and survive through as I find myself feeling now, these seasons never are intended to last forever.
We are just passing through.
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The reality is we both know, believe it or not as this last setback was and is still hard to believe, it is still winter.
Yet, ever since listening to the message and running into photos from some of those different seasons we've been in , everything from our honeymoon to our moving out to California, my heart was ignited with a hope, a hope in this present darkness that nothing in this world can ever take away.
My mind was soon flooded with images and hopes and dreams and desires,
of how my God will restore what the locusts have eaten, of how He plans to continue to use and redeem the pain, of all He has done and will continue to do,
this God, who has anything but forsaken us, nor forsaken me.
this God who enters into every single season and hardship and joy and pain,
who is present, who is faithful.
::
For whatever reason, for the first time just looking and posting pics from my honeymoon has been healing for me. I no longer feel the intense feelings of hurt, lament, loss, and betrayal those images and memories would once bring. Anger, hurt, loss, lament, feeling completely and utterly betrayed by the One who allowed us to experience such respite, only to come home from our honeymoon feeling tricked, tired, but ready for a new stage in my battle with chronic illness, where I could just start to get better on my own.
Yet, now I look at them and there is a much different set of lens at which they're being filtered and processed through.
I no longer feel hurt, betrayal, or disappointment from God who I felt was leading us in another direction, I see the very hand and presence and faithfulness of God, of a God who is present in our suffering and in our weakness, of a God who never ever abandons His children, no matter how hard the winter gets.
A God who does more than merely sympathize and emphasize, but who enters into our pain. In a way more real than anything on this earth we have ever experienced nor imagined, this God who is coming, this God who has come to restore, reclaim, and redeem life.
Life as it was intended to be, not life as we know it.
A God who is coming back to reclaim Eden.
This God who is truly a God who "laughs when we laugh, and cries when we weep."
One who does anything but sit idly by when His children, His beloved are suffering, this God who takes us by the hand and gently whispers time and time and time again to our hurting, feeble, and broken souls,
"I will carry you."
Through and in every season.
