Mine is not a new story

I was walking around the LSU lakes a few days ago, it was a beautiful afternoon, perfectly clear sky, wind blowing, sun reflecting off of the water; but as right as everything in the world looked, something in me felt the ache of the broken world in which we live. Here I was, in the middle of February, 2008, two months from when I should be giving birth to my son, and no one would even know that. No one would know that two months go I lost him. Time is so mysterious; it is a healer in a lot of ways, but it is also a marker of the pain. I can’t help but go back in my mind to “where I would be” if Joshua hadn’t died. I would be seven months pregnant now, I would be getting his room ready, making sure everything was in order, so close to welcoming our little boy home. But all of these things are dreams that will never come to be for him and for me.

Losing Joshua has shaken my faith and made me question my faith, but I am far from losing my faith. Another young woman who has suffered a loss more agonizing than my own in many ways put a great visual on the process I feel like I’m going through: my faith is a house and I still have the house, but all of the "stuff" in my house, my set of beliefs that the structure-loving me wants to hold on to has been brought out on the lawn. I'm inspecting it all to decide whether I'll bring it back in or not. But, no matter how I feel at any given moment, something in me believes. Maybe it’s the years of “feeling it”, maybe it’s growing up in the church, in a Christian home, but most of all I think it’s God. Grace, hope, faith, and peace are gifts and I could not will myself to have them if I tried. People always say that faith helps you get through the difficult times; this experience has brought that home to me in a huge way. If I didn’t trust that God is good, if I didn’t believe that God loves me and my family, if I didn’t believe that I will see Joshua again someday, I don’t think I could get through it. If I didn’t believe these things to be true, I think I would either have become a drug addict or alcoholic, honestly. That sounds terrible, but I can't imagine not being able to find solace in the good that is God, in the love that is God. The meaninglessness of my pain and suffering would be too much to bear.

Right now, I question, I am angry, I am hurt, but despite my feelings and my circumstances, God is today the same as he was on December 2, 2007, when all still seemed right in my world. I have changed, my life has changed, and I’m still trying to figure out how to live in this changed life, but God has not changed; I know it even if I don’t feel it.

There is something about art that really gets to the painful places in a special way. Music, writing, paintings; they all speak to something in me in a way that my own words don’t quite adequately say. As I was walking around the lakes listening to my iPod, a few songs came on that I hadn’t ever really listened to the words of, or paid attention to the words of, but that afternoon they caught my ear and I was thinking to myself, “yes, that is exactly it!” In the song Bittersweet Symphony, there is line that goes something like, “tonight I’m on my knees, I’m looking for a sound that recognizes the pain in me . . .” That is exactly how I feel, I’m trying to hear something, find something that can puts words to and “recognize” the pain now. In the weeks just after we lost Joshua, tears and despair were the feelings I had and everyone around me could see that, but now, two months later, what does this look like, what are the words for it? Another song, The Drugs Don’t Work, also reaffirmed the feelings I wrote about earlier. The thought that without faith, I would be stuck exactly where the writer of the song was stuck; relying on something external to help make sense of the pain. Then, in a song by The Fray that I wasn’t really listening to consciously, came the line “Mine is not a new story, but it is for me.” That is the comfort and the agony. Others have walked this road and roads much more painful, and I get comfort from those who have do so, but I haven’t walked this road before and now I have no other choice. Mine is not a new story, I am well aware, but it is for me.

Grace and peace.