Butterfly Chronicles Volume 36: Relationships

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

Relationship.  That's what we're called to have.  Christ wants relationship not religion.  In living a different life without Zachery - living with his death, living a whole new family life - this has caused me to really, deeply contemplate my relationship with the Lord.  Before Zachery died, I was a Christian.  I believed.  I studied, read, learned, attended a Bible study church; my faith was strong.  But it was as strong as a cheap, wet paper napkin - and I didn't even know it.

It's funny how I kinda lived life thinking I was really something in the Lord.  Having studied and memorized many verses as a child, I could quote my Bible, tell the stories, share the Gospel, and "be" a Christian.  What I know now is that "being" a Christian isn't the same thing as being in a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Think about the hallmarks of remarkable relationships:  honor, integrity, trust, loyalty, honesty, steadfastness, kindness, caring, selflessness, love through thick and thin til death do us part.  Relationship.  I'm only now beginning to understand that idea - Christ wants relationship.  Before Zachery died, I didn't really comprehend the idea of complaining or yelling or screaming or laughing at or with God, with Jesus.  But isn't that relationship?  Aren't the best relationships those where we can bare our souls, hearts, hurts, scars, hilarity, joy, laughter til tears.  Isn't that relationship?

How did I miss that simple concept.  I won't put it tritely - Jesus doesn't want to be my friend.  He's the holy God, creator of the Universe - not my friend.  But He is my champion.  He is my Savior.  He is my grace.  He is who I can crawl to with my best and worse - I mean He already knows it all anyway - so why have I been slow to grow to know that He wants me to share it all with him - the good, the bad, the ugly - and so often what I need to share is bad and ugly. Yep, that's me.  That's honestly me and Lord, You already know.  So what did I miss and why didn't I talk and speak to you like we are in a real, tangible, loving relationship?  How did I not know how to pray and that prayer is conversation, truth, all of it - complaining, screaming, laughing, sharing, loving - all of it.

Relationship.  To have relationship, I have to trust, honor, be loyal and steadfast, cry out in joy, pain, love, hate, imperfection, scarred, brokenhearted, and laughing.  He wants it all.  Imagine that.  No matter what it is, He already knows.  His grace is ALREADY sufficient for me - even if I am just figuring out what that really means.

I read a poster on Pinterest the other day that said,

"Sometimes the things we can't change end up changing us." 

 Wow.  Truth.  Zach, I can't change.  And that has changed me.  It has changed my relationship with Him and with everyone else.  Every day the butterflies come.  Every day I realize that the more I know the Lord, the more inexaustible He becomes and the more humble I grow knowing that if I were to read and study, study and read God's word every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of my life, I'd still be barely out of the "milk" stage.  Relationship.  Give it to Him.  He will carry the burden of all those things we can't change which change us.  Relationship.  Trust Him.  He knows already everything we wish He didn't know and He loves us anyway.  Imagine that.  The Holy God, creator of the universe, Savior - He loves us anyway.

Relationship.  He will give you rest.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 35: He Can Do It

There have been lots of live butterflies today.

Lately, I’ve been choked by guilt.  Guilt is difficult to overcome and forgiveness impossible.  Forgiveness for all the lists of things I wish I could change and all the “ifs” that line up one on top of the other.  I don’t want to be a whiner.  There have been good days, even great days.  A 47^th surprise party given by the man who still makes my palms sweat and who still makes my heart pound and who is really the only other person who knows exactly what I am going through – there have been good days.  And there are good things, people, friends, family.  It’s only that those good days take so much out of us that we recover as if we’ve been hit with all of this all over again.  Never knowing what will wipe us out is tricky.

Which brings me to this whole idea of isolation.  First of all, Peter MD asks me about it every time I check in, and I always tell the truth.  Raeann and the tribe are too pushy to let me isolate completely, but that’s pretty much all I want to do.  The need to hide and avoid and be invisible comes from the fact that each time I meet someone I haven’t seen since Zach’s death, the whole experience wells up inside me, and I am slammed with the grief, the suffocating panic, the stabbing pain.  It is just easier to be alone with those few people who have seen the worst of us at our worst.  Not only that, but I think the whole “be still and know I am God” command kind of demands an isolation of sorts.  Being still and alone or simply quiet with the safe people isn’t such a bad thing – no matter what Peter MD says about it.  He hasn’t been in our shoes, and I hope he never is.

On Sunday, it was really bad.  Flashback after flashback bombarded my mind and the tears came again and again.  That night is something we will all carry for the rest of our lives only to drop away and disappear when we too, like Zach, are face to face with our Redeemer.  It’s horrific.  Memories no one should be forced to carry.  And yet, God allowed that.  

Sunday was bad.  I felt hopeless and helpless and crushed again, and Monday was the same.  I’ve never experienced grief like this – where the “gone” person was with me every day and night for 13 years.  He’s missed by everyone, but they didn’t have him day in and day out so the hole in them is different than the one in us.  There’s just an empty space all the time, a hole, a very deep one.    Lately, I’ve been hit with the deaths of several other people, and I wonder about and pray for the ones who’ve lost the everyday of the person who’s gone.  Their grief is a place that most of us don’t know yet.  Most of us haven’t lost a child or a spouse.  That every single day hole is deep.

And then there’s God and what He’s doing in the midst of all this.  Of course there are the never ending butterflies – every single day- every single one.  As for church, we’ve been doing “home” church, listening to Bible lessons crowded around our kitchen table.  And, I read my Bible almost every day to stay on track with my “through the Bible chronologically” in a year plan.  So part of my reading Sunday morning was Psalm 34.  Reading through it, I stopped.  Part of that Psalm has been quoted to me many times since Zach died, but I had never looked it up or knew exactly what the context was:

¹⁷ The righteous cry out, and the LORD hears them;
   he delivers them from all their troubles.
¹⁸ The LORD is close to the brokenhearted
   and saves those who are crushed in spirit.

I read that in my Bible Sunday morning.  Later, as we listened to our Sunday morning lesson, again, there was Psalm 34, specifically those same verses.  The Lord is close to me with my broken heart and crushed spirit.  Okay so a nice coincidence.  That Psalm 34.

Monday night I soaked in my new tub.  So down and depressed and just sad.  Trying to pick myself up and feed my mind with something good, I thumbed to my place in the Marsha gift of Confessions of a Grieving Christian.  Have you guessed yet that again that message – that Psalm 34 message about God being close to me and my broken heart and crushed spirit was right there in the chapter of that book.  Right there again!  Three times in two days.  I guess I should pay attention when God speaks.

 What I am learning in all this grief and sadness and pain is that it is alright to feel it.  How many times do we read about the tearing of clothes, the smearing of ashes, the gnashing of teeth over tragedy in the scriptures?  Lots in the Old Testament for sure.  I don’t have to feel good, or better, or even okay.  I just need to know that God is there to save me – each day, every day, especially in this.  It’s the isolation that is teaching me who He is.  Peter MD may not like that isolation address, but isolation is where I am until God moves me.  And He will have to move me.  I can’t do it.  I can’t forgive myself.  But He can teach me forgiveness.  I can’t stop asking why.  But He can change the question.  I can’t stop the hole.  He can fill it.

So, no matter how many times those people out there tell me what they think is best for me, only He knows.  And I am very comfortable although miserable with my broken heart because He is close to me.  He knows.  And He will save me.

 

I can’t do it.

He is close to the brokenhearted.  He will save the ones who are crushed in spirit.  And He will keep reminding me with those butterflies that Zach is exactly right where God wants him to be, and that over and over reminder will slowly knit together this broken heart and heal this crushed spirit.  He can do it.

Butterfly Chronciles Volume 34: Death and Taxes

Today I did our taxes.  In the process, I had to answer questions about my kids and answer about Zach that he died in 2011 and how many months had he lived with us?  We render unto Caesar.  We render unto God.

I see the world through a different pair of eyes.  I'm glad.  I just don't like how I got this new pair of glasses.  Sharing a birthday dinner with friends last night, we spoke about survival.  And those who don't.  I don't know why I get up each day, put on make-up, dress, and continue to put one step in front of the other.  Unless all those self destructive years of doing everything but honoring God and finally turning back around made me strong for this journey.  Choices?  It doesn't feel like a choice this life I'm living, but just the right thing to do - to keep going.  I think about that song that says "every step is one step closer to you"...for me that's one step closer to Zach.

I'm southern, completely.  Every time we Southerners come face to face with another Southerner, "How are you?" is the phrase we've said since we were born.  And "fine" is the answer.  Always "fine" or some kindred derivative.  I'm working on a new answer.  Although the asker never knows it, every time I'm asked, "How are you?", my mind immediately thinks of Zach, and how fine I am not. It's not fine or okay or good.  Survivable.  Different.  Anything but "fine."  So, I'm practicing other answers that are true.  "So blessed.  Eternally secure.  Graced out.  Thankful.  Saved.  Growing in Christ."  So many answers that are just so much truer than "fine."

I want to be a planter of seeds.  Or a waterer of seeds already planted.  I don't want to be "fine," and I never knew that before.  "Fine" is not enough.  Not nearly enough.  Through it all, I'm everything but fine, and that's just fine with me.

I don't understand it.  I don't know why.  Maybe soon I won't ask that question anymore.  I'm praying for that day.  What I do know is that the presence of God puts the energy and motion into every single step I'm able to take.  I won't ever be fine again.  I don't ever want to be fine again.  But I will keep taking one step after another - every day closer to Zach.  Life is fatal.  Plant seeds.  Don't just be "fine."  It's just not enough.

And every day, it's not just fine that I am given butterfly after butterfly.  It's so much more than just fine, and that's just fine with me.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 33: A dead Son changes everything

Grief is such a strange animal, raising its head in the most mysterious ways, catching me off-guard, unprepared, always surprised at the intensity.  The way life has changed is still something we are learning to grasp.  A birthday, a dirt cake, a party, Zach's empty chair.  Visitors smiling, hugging, singing, the party in full swing.  But when no one is looking, I looked.  I see the sad eyes searching for an answer to the why?  Eyes missing him, and smiles trying but not hiding the sad.

We hurt for all of us.  Grief makes people uncomfortable.  So uncomfortable – for everyone.  Avoiding people, wearing sunglasses, keeping my head down, a cell phone pasted to my ear only pretending to talk, so I don’t have to talk because I might burst into tears just because you are holding your new baby, and it reminds me of Zach and how small he was until I brought Madison home from the hospital, and that tiny Madison baby made Zach look so big, and that memory welled up in me, and made me cry when I saw her, my friend, holding her brand new baby and seeing how big it made her toddler look now that her tiny new baby was home.  All that welling up just from seeing a new baby.  I couldn't even ask her to hold him.  My heart ached, I started to cry, I made her uncomfortable, and she thought she had made me uncomfortable, and she hadn't at all; it was just all those memories. We don’t want to cry or make anyone else cry, but how can we help it?

A child won't talk about Zach because she worries about making me cry.  I tried to explain that nothing she can say will make me feel any sadder than I already do.  I will probably always be sad, but life keeps going, and we just live through the sad.  Tears are like a tea kettle.  If the top doesn't come off, if they don’t pour over, if the pressure isn't released, that tea kettle will just scream and scream at someone, something, sometime, anytime.  I try to make her understand that tears are not bad.  That they help.  But still she is silent.

So everything is new, and surprising, emotionally erupting, and the best medicine is to stay busy.  “There’s a whole lot of vacuuming going on around here.”  Just stay busy.  Keep the mind focused, moving forward.

The Truth is that a dead Son changes everything. For God so loved every single person in the whole world, He loved us all so much, that He gave up His son as a gift for you and me.  A dead Son changes everything.  I hope that these notes about faith and grief and hope reach one person – just even only one person – with the message of that dead Son who changes everything for eternity.  Believe on that Son – that Savior – that Jesus who died to make a way to perfect goodness and a way to God which we can’t make ourselves.   I know a God who knows me and knit me and knew where I’d be right now even though this grief is the most painful hurt I’ve ever known.  And He knows you too from before time began.

A dead Son changes everything.  I want people to know that my dead son is only physically dead because His son, God’s Son, made a way for my son to live in the presence of the God I know - forever.  God, don’t let Zach’s death be in vain.  Use it to make a difference for that one person who needs You.  You gave Your son and took the one you lent me back.  Use Zach to make Your gospel known – just even to only one person.  That would make me smile even through my tears.  Even if it is is just one.

God, give us the courage and strength to keep living, to not waste the life you've given us, to not let Satan stop our desire to glorify you in the way we live.  Give us courage to live in light of eternity rather than in light of our pain and constant ache for Zach.

For God so loved every single one of us right where we are no matter where that might be that He sent His Son to pay the price for all of us who don’t measure up to perfection.  His gift is ours by simple acknowledgement of what He did for us and that we need what He did for us.  Believe on that Son, Jesus, who died, was buried, and who rose again to save us.  Believe and be saved.  Just one, Lord.  Just one person changed by your Gospel because of Zach.

A dead Son changes everything; He died and rose again so that He could hold my son.  I believe.  I am saved.  Zach is saved.  Be saved.  That dead Son, Jesus, alive forever, changes everything.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 32: My Baking Bonafide Butterfly Beholder

In Him we live and move and have our being.

 

Madison is like a pair of binoculars, ever spotting the highly unspottable, the almost missed, the hidden treasure, the whisper of butterfly wings always.  Life marches.  She will turn 12 in a few days.  I wonder how her memories of 11 will be affected by Zach.  She is strong.  Witty.  An old soul in a young body.  She gets life.  And she's one of those special people who gets jokes way above where her young mind should be perched and she laughs and that makes us laugh and Taylor and Zachery were always shaking their heads saying, "What's so funny?"  And Madison always knew.

The other day, I poured over into a blog all my tears and words and pain and then unexpectedly, accidentally deleted it.  I was overly bothered about the deletion until Madison said, "Well, I guess God didn't want you to publish that one."  Hmmm.  So wise.  So sure.  So clever.  So deep.  She just gets it.  And she's so right about that blog.  I was trying to explain how life is different and how I understand how people just want to move away and be somewhere where no one knows about the death and it was really too much.

That day, the day the blog was erased, I had eaten lunch with two of my tribe members.  (Yes, I belong to a tribe of tribal screaming, praying, laughing, aching, loving women.)  As always, I try really hard to ask them about their boys -  Zach's friends.  And they tell me and mostly it is okay.  But that day, we talked and laughed and talked and they told stories about the marathon XBOX multi screen multi player multi XBOX boxes and 8 hours of only take a break to eat or pee kind of 8 hour marathon of XBOXING.  And all of a sudden it was too much son talk and Zach wasn't there for that play day and I just almost swallowed my own throat trying to hold down the tears.  And that's why I know how it feels to want to leave it all behind and start over, new, somewhere where no one knows.  But life marches and I don't want to march away from those who love us best.

Sometimes I feel bad about my blog because there's not a whole lot of sunshine in it.  But that's what I use it for.  To pour all the clouds and wintery cold winds and blustery gray days of deep sad onto those pages to GET THEM OUT of me!  And it helps and I can see the sunshine again - at least for a while and sometimes for longer than just a while.

And that's where baking and butterflies come in.  This morning, Madison spotted a sparkly spangled monarch and took pictures for me because she's just that way.  Kind, sweet, always thinking of me and the butterflies and what they mean to me.  It's really the only acknowledgement of Zach that she ever makes - those butterflies.  She points out those butterflies but won't mention Zach's name - almost no mention at all for 6 long months.  And I wonder what is going on in that amazing brain she belongs to.  What in the world is she thinking about it all or is she even thinking about it at all or does she ever wish she was somewhere else too?  Whatever she's thinking, she doesn't say much about it and less when we ask.

So today, we baked.  The first baking symphony choreographed on our new kitchen stage.  And we danced and we lunged, plunged cookies in and dipped to drag them back out of ovens.  And it is a quietly sad happy kind of day where the sad is behind the happy instead of in front.  And I like it that way.  Sad second and happy first.

And it is Madison's fault, gift, doing, giving of this happy being first in front of sad day.  And the tiny not gluten free bite bit out of that cookie I took was YUMILICIOUS. And the after cooking symphony continues - the sisters giggle and happy talk pirouettes on toe tips drifting to find me at this desk, and they, ever laughing, eat cookies in the kitchen. 

Life marches no matter what. Thank you God for a day where happy is first in front of sad and giggles leap.  Only in You do I really LIVE no matter where sad or happy land.  In You I live and move and have my being.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 31: Broken Bones and Butterflies

Only He remains the same.

 

This past week, my nephew broke his leg – fibula and tibia all the way through to a leg waggle where that leg should’ve been straight and strong.  Drilling into the bone, the Docs inserted a never to be removed rod which his bone will eventually grow around.  Walk, they said.  Day after surgery, walk they said and he did.  Crutched, drip lines dangling vinelike from veins, he walked on that bone severed rod inserted leg.

Candy and snack laden, we went to visit this beautiful boy in the hospital.  I was ambushed by emotion – his pain, the damage, the drugged boy not quite himself but still him, all grown up but still the fair haired boy I held as a baby.  I was overcome.  Emotions tornadoing.  Relief that he was okay and a stake through the heart pain that even in this pain, he is still alive and I am so glad.  I couldn’t lose another.  No rod strong enough to hold together more broken heart.  And he’s still hurt and we still wait to see if all is well and pray.  But he breathes and I am thankful.

I thought in that hospital visitor’s chair that I would give anything to have Zach in a hospital bed with only something broken – even needing the rods inserted kind of broken but still breathing broken.  I am living a life where I don’t know who I am or who I’ll be or what will uncork the tear flow.  Today it was a chocolate butterfly in a plastic yellow butterfly dotted bag with a Godiva tag.  A gift.  And the tears seeped through the dam crack and then flooded and I had to hide in the bathroom – again and again.

And life keeps coming.  The culmination in sight, Taylor’s graduation is drifting unstoppable and ever closer.  Already wondering how I will feel watching that public slideshow memory march of Taylor’s babyhood to 12^th year pinnacle on that slideshow screen.  How would a mother father grandparent aunt uncle not be teary even if Zach was here?  But Zach will be there on that screen loving his sister, them so close and together and smiling and breathing.  Heartbeats tapping through time, a rhythm of life joy.  And seeing that and we will just have to breathe through it.  All of us, never knowing if we’ll be smiling or so sad from the weight of ten thousand thousand tears.  We are all different and unsure of what happens in even the next moment.

Always asking the unanswerable questions – how did we get here? Why?  Why did this happen?  Why didn’t we know?  What could we have done?  An unending circle of endless questions with no door to open for answers.

 

And we are still recovering from two moves in 10 days and still unpacking and we are tired and bittersweet happy.  Together, Michael and I slowly unwrapped the plastic holding those Zach drawers shut.  Those drawers full because we couldn’t face the insides before.  Time now to empty them and give a new life to that dresser.  That dresser full of his life starting a new life.  Everything new everywhere – this whole life we live – all different and unknown and unsure.  And Zach there in every molecule of every item in every corner of those drawers we unpacked and repacked.  Tears dripping and heart pain throbbing and that panic ever pulsing at the back of my neck stealing my air.

His white ribbed “gangster” tank tops that became a joke between us sleep folded now on a shelf in my closet.  The green jersey he wore and warred in on that football field hangs lifeless, but I play the memories alive in me.  And Jonathan with his broken bones and rod breathes.  And I am so thankful for rods and broken bones.

If you meet me and I can’t look you in the eye, forgive me.  Sometimes I hide in the grocery store. If you invite me and I say no, forgive me.  If you call, sometimes I can’t answer even though I skip a beat wondering if there is tragedy on the other end of that ringing phone.  There is no moment when I am sure of what the next moment will feel like.  I don’t even know who looks back at me in the mirror.  The only thing I can think about who I am is that He knew me before there was time and He knit me together and holds me together and I am changed and only He remains the same.  These days seem harder than the first days.  The wall of numb fell like Jericho, and I am left standing wishing I was invisible.  Six months.

 

“Isolating?” asks Peter M.D.  I find that yes, I am doing that more and more, and I won’t tell him that and my friends will be pushy and limit the isolation, but it is survival.  There’s only so much real life I can survive right now.  And I never quite know when enough is too much.  I love that song that says “fear is just a lie.”  I hold on to that – that this fear I feel is just a lie.  What work God is doing I know not.   I can barely take one step after another and what work He is doing He will do.  It’s like I’m suspended again in the pre-birth amniotic fluid waiting to be reborn – this place of being so weak that letting Him walk me is easy because I’m too weak to get in His way with my way for once.  And every day, He gives me butterflies.  And I believe Zach is in those butterflies and knows about those butterflies.  And I tell him hello.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 30: Timberrrrrrrr

Grace.  Lost and found.

A deep hollow voice in the green woods echoed today, "Tiiiimmmmbbbeeerrrrrr!!!"  Yup, right before I melted down in the public of those I hold so dear.  Face first, full tilt, splat.  Heartache, hormones, and home relocations mix like alcohol and tranquilizers - big, Big, BIG mistake...

Yesterday I wrote about not knowing me anymore.  Today, I proved it.  Thinking too strong, too capable, trying too hard to be "normal", to do "normal", to not ask for help, to not even be able to look past this moment to know I need help...this is all me.  Nuclear fall out me.  And to top it all off, I did all of this in front of my Madison.  Ugly.  It was just shameful.

Grief is like that proverbial thief in the night.  It tiptoes in and robs me blind before I even know I've been hacked.  I emotionally suckered punched myself and spewed it all over a group of people who least deserved it.

I apologized.  No excuses.  Difficult circumstances, yes, but no excuses.  A strange place to live - not knowing when the rubber band is too taut and might snap.  I felt ashamed, embarrassed, sorry, and just plain emotionally spent.  I hope they will forgive me - give me grace.

Driving home, I thought about how so much of what happened today stems from Zach's death.  I don't exactly know how to keep moving forward when my umbilical cord with Zach is so thick and holding me so tightly. 

Before the fallout today, my first butterflies came on a card from Reanne.  When I arrived home today - post flat face fall, my sister had delivered a butterfly to my door.  Later my sister came over and told me about a live butterfly that was flying around outside my backdoor and finally alighted on my butterfly garden - a butterfly gift from Kim.  In the very middle of one of those milkweed leaves was a perfectly yellow butterfly egg.  Just when I needed to find butterflies the most.

I fell flat.  God said, "So what, now what?"  And He is always right.  Now what, Beth?  What I am learning is that I need to be different.  From moment to moment, all the time - especially from today.  Every moment is a chance lost or found for the Lord.  Today I lost, but He found me like He always does.  Death is devastating.  But it is a circumstance not an excuse.  I miss Zach in a way I can't describe.  A circumstance, not an excuse.  We have an amazing God who finds us even when we are lost.

I got lost - again.  But He found me - again, just like he always does.