Butterfly Chronicles Volume 49: Peter MD, Faith, Lies, and Butterflies

"...after the fire a still small voice."

Grief sucks.  Grief, a man chasing the “horizon – round and round they sped.”  Heart holes bigger, not better.  

Peter MD, “expert” and those cited “experts,” I spout shut-up at all of them.  Grief doesn’t live at your address, suicide isn’t your house number.  Until you walk down my street, don’t tell me what NOT to do.  Isolation, says Peter MD and those “experts,” is unhealthy.  Shut-up.  Isolation is a friend, a cloak of armor guarding others from me as much as it protects me from them.  Does anyone REALLY want to hear the craptastic grief talk?  I wouldn’t, couldn’t.  I couldn’t handle it – someone else’s grief.  No funeral homes or gravesides or hearses for me right now, and never would be too soon.

 

Does any audience really want to hear or know what this is like, and the answer is no.

Peter MD, I said, it’s not like you’d be bar-sitting, sipping an aged scotch listening to the aching, seeping sap of grief crap for free…you do it for money;  you wouldn’t do it for free.  Chuckled, he certainly did, that MD Peter.

So, I told him my lies.  Lies maybe I shouldn’t tell here in these words.  The lies are - that on this street -I’m not telling the truly true truth.  Repeating faith words, I have no faith.

MD shoves back and challenges me– the enemy lies he says.

I shoot back, I don’t want to give up my guilt and grief and pain or give it to God or give in to forgiveness, or even give in to believing I’m forgiven.  All I feel is fault and failure.  And I know this is wrong, but I don’t even care.

Lies.  I’ve told out loud what I believe intellectually, but mine is a dead heart without heart conviction.  I don’t know if Truth is true anymore.

Peter interjection (ho hum I think) – Mr. Peter MD, he goes on and on, it’s not a feeling; Faith is not a feeling.  Faith, he says, is doing it, saying it, singing it, worshiping it, living it – especially in the deepest, darkest, most dangerous doubting.

Maybe so, MD.  But in the hidden places of a black heart, I spit at God.  Why?  Why? Not only about Zach, but why’s about all of us.  Why would You do this to anyone – us?  Guilt for Zach, spitting at God for a father alone now, no guy adventuring, a dad’s eyes sad glassed.  A sister who can’t sit in the quiet, calm life, or the missing Zach blankets her all sticky hot.  A sister who seems sure and fine about Zach’s heaven life, but we wait for a day for that dam to break – the grief gush – will it come or will it not – waiting.  There's so much guilt all piled up on top of all those what-if's and why's and why's and what-if's.

Like a heroin addict, I go back and back for the guilt, the why’s, the doubts, basking in the self absorption of pain, rolling like a dog on death, my pride refusing to bow to Truth.  Lies – the lie that I believe in Zach’s where; Lies that any of that Truth stuff is a comfort or peace or a bandage slowing the grief flow.

MD speaks – That’s faith.  When you keep on moving when it doesn’t make sense, or  when you doubt, or when you don’t even believe that you believe, and you keep moving - that’s faith.  It’s doing those things even when you can’t SEE the Truth.

I’m just hard enough, I say, from the younger life of living mistakes – scarred and dirty and living with a life I regret and mistakes that still burn so many years later - I’m just hard enough and hard headed enough to make it - even depressed.  I so get why people don’t make it though. 

 My toes hang over the failure cliff always wishing the jump.  Some days I know I won’t make it.  Whispers.  That Alpha Omega, the I AM whispers:  selfish.  Others need you to make it so they can make it and they'll make it so you can make it.  Don’t rip the beginning scab that I’ll grow over each of you in My time. No jumping.  Lies.  I don’t believe Him, but I keep writing those verses and reading those verses, finding truth even when I don’t believe it’s true, and I don’t jump.

Grief is full of lies.  Enemy lies.  Heart lies.  Faith lies.  God will have to separate the lies and true Truth and Peter MD says faith means we keep going.

And the God who made me and knit me together in the womb keeps whispering. "Stop fighting a fight that's already been won." Keep going.  Keep going.  Keep going.  True Truth in the middle of all those lies. 

Grief sucks.  It’s hard.  It’s almost a year, and I’m counting the last moments of my son’s life and seeing him in them and missing him so hard I’m broken into uncountable pieces; I'm invisible.

It just SUCKS, and He whispers, a still small voice, and He asks me what I am doing here, and I try to remember the Truth.

Butterfly Chronicles Volum 48: Paradise

"...you will be with Me in paradise..."

I write amidst a herd of white butterflies frolicking in the air around me and over the cliff edge to enjoy luscious shades of wavy blue-green aquas.

God's Kauai, one of the most impressively tranquil, breathtaking, peaceful places we've ever been, will hopefully be a repeat destination - and we don't repeat locales...until now.   Including traveling to the Waimea Canyon, hiking the rain forest above the canyon, stumbling down a jungle path to Queen's Bath, washing in the towering waves of Polihale beach, almost drowning while trying to paddle board as the wind unexpectedly tossed Hanalei Bay, listening to wild roosters doodle doooo all over the island, we've, with gleeful abandonment, surfed our time together.

As the sun delicately tip toes under the horizon splashing palest pinks, oranges bursting forth out of the womb of clouds, with a last sigh of day disappearing, sun sleeps and moon rises.  These days' ends float in the quiet of a creeping muscle ached tired moving closer to night rest.  It is in these door closings to day times - the empty heart place filling with stone, heavy and perching, dark as ocean night, over my eyes tear filling.  Uplifted gaze to God's crystal sky suspended chandelier - eyes trying to see the unseen and know the unknowable.  Sad comes hard, quick.

I wouldn't erase the coming here.  We four would just paint the pallet into we five -  filled with that Zach smile, that Zach bursting laughter ,that Zach daring jumping into skyscraper waves and sucking back ocean mouth pounding bodies into sand filling swim suits - tail ends drooping like dirty diapers - clawing our way back to safe shore.

Paradise, Zach's and ours, different places, his perfect, ours as perfect as fallen world can offer, we five live.  We four live forward to his and His paradise where we will be five forever.

So strange the empty space, so full of longing our hearts, so heavy the air not filled - sometimes knowing he is in forever paradise just isn't enough. 

A soul salve, the waves soothe.  Paradise waits. We try to move forward without forgetting what is behind. 

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 47 - Reflections of Happy

Count your blessings,
Name them one by one
Count your blessings,
See what God has done.

Some days are okay – not good really, but not so sad – a break.  I wanted to write this now before the bottom drops out.  Sad’s hot breath curls the hair and tingles the skin on the back of my neck.  It won’t be long, so I want to talk happy today.

I read an article,

 http://redeemercitytocity.com/blog/view.jsp?Blog_param=446, that I really liked.  In it, J.R. Tolken was quoted from his Lord of the Rings series saying that God will make “everything sad come untrue.”  Just wow.  I serve an awesome God.

Listening to Christian radio (KSBJ), which has literally been a lifesaver for the past 10 ½ months, I heard one of my favorite songs this morning – which like so many – made me cry, but made me feel TRUTH – you know the kind that comes from a God so full of love it never ends.

I still believe in Your faithfulness.

I still believe in Your TRUTH.

I still believe in Your holy Word.

Even when I don’t see, I still believe.

Take a listen; skip the ad at the beginning. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4qPceadBMU&feature=related

Through the pain, God.  Just God.  Words sneaking around the walled up parts of my brain whisper, “Somebody always has it worse.  Somebody always has it worse.”  Sickened I feel by that mantra, but truth is truth no matter how hard it hurts.

I was able to share intimately with a grief stricken person recently, and I felt a sense of peace as I shared the slopes up and down I’ve slid on this journey.  It was good to share.  I hope it helped.  

The missing never stops.  Fear reaches out to embrace my hand, my mind, a deadly romancer.  This week, tearless, I’ve seen so many butterflies.  This week - my body licking up the sunlight blanketing the green soccer fields - I watched butterflies rest on branches, opening and closing wings to a beat I couldn’t hear, a beat orchestrated and choreographed by the One.  Wings open.  Close.  Open.  Close.  The door to my heart, open, but closed.  God and Zach visiting me under an oak tree, a ballet of wings under a green umbrella of dancing light.

Mind, heart, reality, past and present still veering in opposites, split, disconnected.

Thank you for visiting so many, many times this week, Zachery.  Thank You, God, for Zachery and for blessings to count.

Count your many blessings – see, SEE, SEE what God has done.