Butterfly Chronicles Volume 29: Just Different

 Be Still and know that I am God.         

Over the course of 10 days, we moved two times plus some – old house into storage one weekend, out of storage into new house the next.  And then we moved all our stuff out of my parents’ home after accepting their patient, generous, and gracious hospitality for more than 5 months.  Moving all by itself is top10 stressful so we took the double black diamond slope down that mountain.

Never did I try to believe that moving would make things better.  Not going to the old house is easier, but okay is something I will never be again – I’ll just be different and wandering through that new forest of self with all the shades of green is a creepy, strange, sometimes sunny, often times simply sad place to be.  I don’t know me anymore.

Around and around and around the inside of our new home, Zach boxes plant like trees. Zach trains, Zach hunting, Zach balls, Zach fragile, Zach closet, Zach, Zach, Zach, our Zach everywhere but not there.  I try not to look at those boxes and can’t explain the pain and panic and wall without windows and doors trapped feeling that clamps onto me when I see those boxes.  I feel that stuff, that life, that baby, that boy, that son.  Opening those boxes like ripping open a stitched wound.  I can’t.  Not yet.  I don’t want a Zach shrine, but what’s there to do with those memories all tied up and rooted in all that stuff in all those boxes?

Stuff in boxes, a life packed away, a suitcase-less, empty handed journey to the story of neverendings – a mansion prepared in advance, a new home.  A lovely journey to heaven it must be leaving all the weight of this life’s stuff behind…the imperfection, the guilt, the anger, the fear, the incomplete souls left wrecked at the Fall, all finally falling away.  Zach didn’t take any thing with him, just the eternal knowledge he stored up from what God taught him on his way through this breath of time to timelessness.

My life now is the double edged sword with bitter blade on one side and sharp sweet on the second.  How did we get here?  Where to go next?  I hope.  I hope and cry and hope.

The numbness ebbs away.  Coming straight at me – life living – climbing from the cocoon.  Today, I felt speeded up, felt panic at the thought of returning to a pace where I wouldn’t see butterflies.  Why death to make me slow, s l o wwwww.  Slow down.  I don’t want to go fast, faster, faster still.  Life is fast enough without me running racing sweating fighting flying faster faster faster through days and nights.  Do I really want to live where God is first?  Or do I want to get back onto the Satan Speedway where wisps of God fly by outside my racing window where butterflies don’t exist because I can’t grasp God when I’m not being still.  How much of my day is spent racing – my heart, my mind, my mouth, my feet, ticktockticktockticktock the clock won’t stop.  Or won’t it?  It is a choice that ravaging rocket race and a choice that gentle caressing living through flower gardens swelling with life aromas. It is a choice.  Zach made a choice.  Daily, I have a choice to make.

God, give me the courage, the strength, the intelligence, the calm gentle presence of You, to pour like golden honey through this life and to refuse the race, to give up what’s at that finish line bodies juggle past me fighting to reach.  Keep in the forefront of my mind that the finish line I so often see isn’t even on Your track.  Grow me to be still and know.  I want to know you God.  I want to know who’s holding my son and who gave up His son so my son could be held.

I will never be okay.  But sometimes okay isn’t good enough.  Sometimes I just need to be different.  To be different and to stay different.   I just want to be still and know the God who will make all things right.  The God who makes Zach all right.  I want to see the butterflies.  He sends them every single day.  My pain is great, but my God is greater still.  Be still and know.