Memories of nightmares

My mama always sighs when the sunshine beams out from all around a cloud. Tonight it was a cool lemon yellow, the shadows all lavender and gray. I was bone tired, lazily listening to the children's chatter about their day, their art projects, watching the fields go by: corn 5 feet tall in the low ones, then a rusty sun burnt patch of soybeans, more corn, but this only up to my knee. The wind bounced off the mustardy corn tassels, almost like thousands of invisible fairies running across them. We were belting out "Jesse's Girl" to the classic rock station, and it was the fourth song I remembered. In a row. My thoughts caught a ride on that memory, how old I'm getting when my kids relate better to pop songs than I do, and all my favorites are on the oldies station. Then the mind swings and hooks on to the lyrics again. I am suddenly back in reality with a jolt, still singing along with all the rest. Except somehow I don't feel old any more; I feel like I'm sixteen.

.............................................................

I am awake with the stars, my loves all heavy with black velvet slumber, as if the night sky had descended and covered them in the dark. I'm running through memories that won't stop coming. Trying to fly and float simultaneously, for I could feel the undertow of the funneling brain dragging down into the darkness. I remember floating down rivers in gangs of high school and college kids, and going through the whitewater sections, we all would lift our arms and legs out of the water, pointing our toes, clutching tubes so that we wouldn't be caught by a sudden drop or a deadfall's rotting branches.

As each thought spins and catches the next, springs that and the next, and so on - one memory latches on to another. I am sixteen and singing with my best friend and driving way too fast. Then I remember doing my penance on the way home, trying to somehow defeat what fun or happiness I'd experienced. Emotions churned unnamed, almost unnoticed, the steel of my mind's resolution to contain emotion slowly descending like ice through my veins. Numb, I remember putting my hand to my face slowly, and I thought, this is what they mean when they say "her eyes glinted". My other hand slowly grips the steering wheel harder, I set my jaw, I swerve to the left into the oncoming lane, go over a hill almost flying. Then squeal back into my lane after playing chicken with the first car. That sudden, visceral mixture of extreme pain and extreme pleasure that burns up intensely and quickly, then suddenly is receding from your core. Sixteen has been gone eighteen long years and still the memory brings back all that sensation - WHAM! Just like that.

You ride out the adrenaline and rush of the memory of sixteen, fastforwarding lackadaisically through your life. You hit on twenty-one, when you graduated and moved to Minneapolis and bought your first house. You remember the numbing effect of work on all those vagrant thoughts and sensations, the more you could throw yourself into technical details, the quieter were the longings and the broken heart. And there the memories finally stop flowing. You pause, catching your breath. Yes, they're gone.

..............................................................

I wish I could sleep, shut off, rest. The hours creep by and the panic builds..."How can I live on 4 hours of sleep..." "oh, now we're down to 3 hours! Hurry up and go to sleeeep!" Often these days the gray dawn begins to creep into the bedroom, and I haven't yet slept. So I sigh deep and aching, shuffle out to the kitchen, have a cup of coffee with you. Some kind of mania or hyper-awareness comes occasionally. Almost as if my wires are too finely tuned and respond to the slightest signal. Vascillate rapidly between almost-awake and almost-asleep. Funny, I've always thought it odd to wish someone "golden slumber"; I crave complete blackness, unconsciousness, completely isolated from my mind and body, suspended in some netherworld of sometime dreams or nightmares and long periods of silence when the brain waves slow and the deep whir swelling from their revolutions lulls you into spellbound, still and staring.

Is it wrong to be looking for a shut-off switch for memories and ruminations? Could I dull myself to passive somehow, be less complicated? There is no manual for one's own deconstruction. 

Nighmare-chaser

I ran out of the woods once, when I was seven I think, and I could feel something fluttering at my ankles. It felt heavier than gravity, magnetism, alive - as if the back of my body had unraveled into strings and I was disintegrating, smaller and smaller, into atoms, bosons - the whole of the woods the unseen entropy of a black hole gaping, choking me back into nothingness, lost forever. 

The clearing in the woods used to be a magical, Narnian kind of place, with dappled sunlight diddling down through aspens and long waltzing grass that sprouted just there on the forest floor, because of the light. I read Bridge to Terabithia and that clearing was my Terabithia, and after it became the landing zone for my torment when I was seven and eight, I thought maybe I'd reclaim it someday with my little brother, like Jesse in the book did. But it never happened.

Now I am in my 30s and for a long time I've lived with torment, until it has become like water washing over a river stone, so much a part of life that you don't even notice the layers of self washing away down the stream.  Torment comes out of nowhere and never like a train through the dark, with the noise of wheels clacking steel and a whistle to warn you. One night you sleep like a happy mother of children, and the next night you close your eyes and all the people you love, those faces you cup between your hands and call holy and beautiful, they twist into awful visage and become villains of the very worst kind and your heart is broken over and over. Broken worse then the worst break-up you ever had. Broken like if your daddy ever said, "I hate you," or you were 3 and landed in foster care, or maybe broken in some small way like Jesus on the cross when He had to look all that evil in the eye and say, "I love you anyway." 

You wake between each nightmare and in that panic in the midnight black you try to remember just one verse to latch on to, because your mama told you the verses will keep you from sinking, a verse to pull yourself out of the ocean of fear. 

A verse comes floating out of the deep, and off your lips in the wrinkled pentameter of breathlessness and half-memory:

What time

I am

afraid

I will

trust

in

Thee.

In those few moments between each nightmare, when you are fully awake, the night is just night, and people just people, loved ones sleeping and breathing. Out on the porch, the air is velvet with the moisture of mid-summer, and you bring the dog out with you for company. 

Because you can still feel the fluttering around your ankles, no matter how many years pass, no matter how many times you run out of the dark woods without getting trapped, no matter how many staircases you make it to the top of without being pulled down...they are still there, nipping at your heels and laughing because they've got you running scared.

The husband sleeps, and the children sleep, and over the grassy hill your mama and your papa sleep, too. No one is awake at 1 a.m., 3 a.m., 5 a.m. when you can't shake the nightmares. Just the dog. She doesn't speak or make a sound. But in those honey eyes with just a hint of red sunset in them, the way the lids pull up and the bottoms droop - those eyes say, I see your pain. I know you're afraid. And that is what is saving me these long, sleepless nights.

She lays her chin on my bare, unshaven leg, and the fluttering around my ankles stills. We breathe together. She lets out a long sigh (ending in grumph) because she can't take my pain away. And I because I can't chase it away. I say it slowly, this time a prayer, a talisman for the next time I close my eyes this night - please, Lord, let me be at peace.

What time I am afraid I will trust in Thee.

Dragons and Knights

I hear it like the drum beat of my own heart throbbing for sins I cannot repay. I feel it like the taboo of words of confession long on my lips but never sufficing. But He interrupts me in my mutterings of confession, and a simple image crushes my confessing lips until they are bruised with anguish. For He has bled, drop by drop, for this sin I cannot forgive myself for. He has shed every tear, sweat blood in Gethsemane, and hung naked on the tree to cleanse this sin from the book of my life.  Erased! Erased! Erased! He calls, as I linger on in self-torment. Does my blood mean nothing to you? Would you shed your own, the sinful river of blood running through human veins that cannot repay, when the perfect Lamb has already been slain for this sin you call unforgivable? Would you spend your days in torment in a prison you've built yourself, when everything I own, I, King of Glory, I would give you freely? Joy unspeakable, cup running over, and you trade it for bitter hyssop and a cup full of vinegar and days full of tears?

And as He whispers, deep in the silent night as I sit on the porch steps and watch the storm clouds rolling in, my house asleep, and my sleep destroyed by nightmares. He whispers something of a princess whose crown was ruined long ago. He whispers He doesn't care; He sings of rescue. Something about a castle where that princess was captive. Something about throwing out curses and drawing lines in the sand, and gathering the stones that would have been hurled my way into piles instead (John 8). Restoring crowns, and redeeming all of us, sinners - scandalous, scorched and scourged - the beautiful broken. He has made us whole.

...reposting an excerpt from this post, humbled by my own words from March 9, 2011

It's just like falling in love

I'm in the land of dreams, that sunset-gold bright hazy world where light floats on the breeze like cotton in the spring and there's magic layered on magic. I'm talking to a friend about to be married, explaining the difference between how you fall in love with a man and how you fall in love with a baby.

You fall in love with a man tentative, even though it feels like a brick wall falling, love booming miraculous and echoing loud through the halls of your heart that have been aching to hear those sounds since the beginning of time. You don't know anything about him, this alien life form all hairy and full of new smells and sounds and coming into your shared space one morning with his raggedy t-shirts from old concerts and jeans stained and smelling of gasoline, a bunch of tools you don't know the names for, shampoo you'd never buy from the dollar section, and socks on your floor, boxers in the bathroom, and hair. Everywhere. (Don't cry to me about clogged drains with long hair, boys. It's payback for the million times we've swept around the tub surround, believe you me.)

My very first non-date with my future husband

But a baby is a whole different experience. They explode out of your body in this other-worldly, out-of-body don't-care-if-you-refuse-drugs you may as well have taken heroin before hand sort of experience, and there they are on your belly that you'll never recognize again anyway, slippery, slimy, blue and squealing like a piglet, and something shatters inside you in a silent and irreversible process that you can't orchestrate or prevent, and you are in love. Now, having a baby is different for every mom. But for me, there was nothing alien about my babies. Not their smell, not their sounds, not their bodies, not their schedules, not the way they latched on to my breasts, which I thought would be the weirdest part of it all (how I thought that would trump, *ahem*, the way they entered this world, I don't know, but I thought it would). 

Sniffing Caleb at 8 weeks, 2 weeks before I was diagnosed with cancer

I spent 24 hours a day either smelling or nursing my babies. I rarely washed them because they seemed perfectly perfect the way they were. (Okay, I'll admit it. About day three, they started to smell like goat cheese, and so did I, and so I showered with them in this incredible - albeit crazy, hippie, and potentially creepy - experience of a co-shower. I didn't bathe them in an actual bathtub unless we were at Grandma's where this weirdness would be, well - weird. Or until they were six months old and I'd come out of my baby-having induced coma and become a baby-escaping psycho instead.) Incredibly, I can't find many pictures of me smelling them. Kind of like I have about 4 photos of me kissing my husband even though I kiss him all the time. Curse of the photographer - you're always on the other side of the lens. And there's no way I'm posting pictures of me nursing them on my blog. Although I did make my husband take photos of me nursing them so someday I can look at them and remember. I doubt I'll ever show them to anyone else, unless maybe the girls want to see them if they go crazy, gung-ho hippie when they have their own kids in similar fashion to their own mother who made the switch from conservative, short-cropped hair SUV driving snowboarder to baby-wearing, co-sleeping, baby-sniffing, coo-coo for CoCo Puffs baby lover in less than 5 minutes postpartum.

Sniffing Caleb when my hair started to grow back 4 years into my cancer battle in early 2012.

The thing about love is, it doesn't matter how it forms in your heart, how it grows once there, or whether it's the curious, still-getting-to-know-you kind of love I have for my husband of ten years or the ferocious, lioness, kill-you-if-you-look-cross-eyed-at-my-cubs kind of love I have for my four kids of 8 years. And the kind of panic that love can bring out in you - that's exactly the same, no matter what kind of love you're talking about. 

Panic is all around these days. Panic that I'm failing - again - as a wife and mother. Pain in my heart and pain in my body have got me cocooned in my bed again, slipping down the slippery depression slope faster than I can pull myself back up it with meds and coping skills and therapy appointments. How can you hold a heart together when it is breaking? I still don't have an answer for that one. 

Panic that we are not ready - our family is so unready - to face another season of storming. If Amelia does have cancer - something that the doctors seem to talk about more matter of factly with every passing doctor's visit and I'm trying to get to a place of mixed denial-acceptance (?) about - how are we going to shore up for this one? Where is Jesus on this stormy sea? Will He come and stall the storm or is He going to have us ride it out until we think we're dying like the disciples? Katy is head over heels for sports, and needs time outside every day with Aaron or I, feeding her dreams, fueling her body. Rosy is at some 7 year old angst-ridden cross-roads, trying to find her identity, wanting to be herself in our family, pushing for some freedom to follow her own dreams. We need to find ways to make it happen for her - an instrument, a sport, some art lessons - something that is just hers, something to captivate her heart and make those eyes glow again and her little soul sing. Amy's too tired to want much of anything. We're focusing mostly on building her up physically for the physical battle to come - focusing on immune health and trying to put a little meat on her bones in case chemo is in the works for her. Caleb is his usual fitful, boundary pushing self. He needs more to do, no doubt about it. More structure, more boundaries, more to engage his mind and his body. And here's where you can queue the "Mom's failing" music again. So many things to do, and I feel like I can't even get meals on the table or my house cleaned! How can I meet the needs of their souls? And how do I decide what to put first? How can I meet soul needs in a house full of chaos but how can I put off soul needs until I quell the chaos who knows when? 

When did love get so complicated? 

There is panic about my marriage. It is so easy, in times of stress, to slip into old habits of survival. He goes to sleep early, and I stay up late, dogged by nightmares and insomnia, and we are two ships passing the night and intimacy is a rare thing. We've learned how to be comfortable together in these seasons, but fear is an old enemy that launches into my soul, and I worry that I'm abandoning him out of selfishness and that he won't want me the way I am now and he will find comfort somewhere else more attractive, less real, less raw. We cry together, and he holds me in my dark moments, and I hold him in his. We both have faith that there will be better days again, nights in the darkness when we are safe in each others arms and the bedrock of marriage that God guards and planted and protects will still be there. 

In the cracks and crevices, in between the chaos and the sticky floors, the dishes piled high and the surviving of the busy schedules crammed with doctors appointments and kids ball games and trying to find time to have fun as a family, there is always joy. Twenty minutes on our bed looking through old photos with the kids remembering days before cancer when we were two kids in love with babies to sniff and toddlers running around buck naked and a clean house with just a smattering of toys and dinner always on the table at six and long kisses after his work day. He puts on the telephoto lens and captures a gold finch flitting in the afternoon sun and we look at those images together and my heart melts right into his, and we are one, two made one, two pieces of one whole, two halves that found each other in a big wide world of strangers. We struggle to keep our eyes open in the cold dark night at the drive-in movie theater while the kids sleep in the back of the suburban and his big brown hand finds mine and he anchors me, in the silence we remember that we love this, we love the same things, and when life is over and done it will be reduced to moments like these when we loved each other and loved the same fleeting beauties on a sea of changing circumstances and through every hardship and difficulty. Two cardinals fly by the porch while we perch in sorrow, a male and a female, and suddenly it is my grandpa and grandma, three years now gone to heaven together, and we remember their love story of loss and brokenness, and the tears dry and we are laughing at this little wink from heaven that life goes on and life is soon over, and remember that, though time is short and times are tough, we are a cord of three strands not quickly broken.

When did love get so easy?

Undone

Venus on the horizon at sunset

Let your boat of life be light, packed only with what you need - a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink, for thirst is a dangerous thing. (Jerome Klapka Jerome)

I have a nightmare, excruciating. I am with my husband and two of my children, the eldest and the youngest. We take a sightseeing ride over St. Anthony Main, where the Mississippi burgeons for the first time into her full glory as a major river of the United States. The river is 300 feet below us, huge boulders slicing her flow into streams. Suddenly the car we are in tips haphazardly to the side, nearly spilling us to our death over the rocks. My husband grabs my son's ankle and my daughter grips the rope. Then we huddle together in the bottom of the car, shifting all our weight to the other side, trying to keep it upright. I beg my sleepy husband to hold tight to my son's ankle or I will go mad.

I wake up sweaty, and it is time to get up and get ready for work. I put on my scrubs, my PhD(c) lab coat, my stethoscope. I head back to the ICU to pick up a patient. I face the scorn in the eyes of the coworkers. I try to find the cath lab to drop this patient off for his procedure. I am squeezing the bag that connects to oxygen and the tube through which he breathes while comatose. I can't find the lab through the maze of construction in the hospital, and I am begging, "Lord, if this is a nightmare, please let me wake up." The stress mounts, and I am undone.

I come up another level, this time really to consciousness. At least, I think so. I am drenched, weary, fearful. What if this is just the third nightmare-within-a-nightmare? I have visions of the movie Inception. It is not until 30 minutes later, pulling on my yellow jacket and heading out the door to church, that I am sure I am really awake this time.

This is PTSD. The nightmares and flashbacks bring me continually to my knees, so that I pray even in my sleep. How can I deny that God is moving through the most painful season of my life, when all the traumas of past days come crashing down and I can finally hear the sound of the walls in my heart moaning under the pressure of new stress, collapsing and clouding my mind with their dust and grit.

In Deuteronomy 31, God sings through Moses' mouth these words to Israel:

I would have said, "I will cut them to pieces. I will wipe them from human memory," had I not feared provocation by the enemy, lest their adversaries misunderstand, lest they should say, "Our hand is triumphant, it was not the Lord who did all this." See now that I, even I, am He, and there is no god beside me: I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and there is none that can deliver you out of My hand. For I lift up my hand to heaven and swear, "As I live forever, if I sharpen my flashing sword, and my hand takes hold on judgment, I will take vengeance on my adversaries and will repay those who hate me." Rejoice with me, O heavens, bow down to Him, all gods, for He avenges the blood of His children...and cleanses His people's land. (Deuteronomy 31: 26-27; 38-41; 43)

He wants me undone. He wants me struck open like an overripe melon, spilling my guts and hollowing out a place for Him. He wounds me so that He may bind me, so that I might see the awesome power of His hand in my life. While I am hurting, I sit in the palm of His hand, in His grip. When I am whole, it is He who makes me so. He empties out my life, so that I might simply live. He sweeps away distractions and leaves only that which matters most, so that I might notice the simple joy and the all-consuming love that surrounds, instead of all the cobwebs I've stored up in my spiritual house. It is as if the furniture has been removed, and standing in the echoing room are my husband and children, my family and friends, just people - nothing else. The sun streams in the windows and hits the whitewashed walls, and I am undone again, this time by the incredible beauty of His creation instead of the cardboard crowns I have constructed life long. I can say, this day, that I care nothing for appearances, abandoning them for the absolute, pure glory of God.

Glory to God, the beginning and the end, Who was, and is, and is to come. (Revelation 1:8)

Finding clarity

"Nor height, nor depth, neither any other created thing, shall be able to sever me from the love of God, which is in our Lord Yeshua The Messiah." (Romans 8:39)

I panic in the flashback because I can't remember who I'm married to. My husband looks long and deep, brown eyes meeting faltering brown, and says he'll help me remember. Day turns into evening, thick with snowflakes as we slip slide our way to town to watch my old hockey team play. Another snippet of the nightmare creeps into consciousness...I remember trying out for the girls' summer softball team there in my dream, and they tell me I am too old to play, 28 already. I have forgotten a decade of birthdays and I squeeze my eyelids tight and try to remember them, shadows sliding across consciousness as impressions of memories try to break through my sleep.

I find truth in my sons kisses and my husbands laughter, in the pages of my Bible as Romans leaps out like a sword to sever me from dreams. The kids rock out through the night to Shawn Groves, and his lyrics soak in, make my brain slippery to dreams and nothing catches all night long. I wake up to peace, the world under the blanket of winter and my mind calm and clear as the whispering air, crystalline in the cold. I praise God for the night's sleep, uninterrupted and serene. 

Praise God for the Word that is alive and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, dividing asunder soul and spirit, joints and marrow, judging reasoning and consciousness of the heart. (Hebrews 4:12)

No death, life

Angels or demons,

No height, depth

Can come in between us

And Your love

~Shawn Groves, Come By Here~

Outside looking in

I look down at my arms, and they are alien arms stitched on my body. I am not that old. I search the sand dunes of memory, sifting for a name, my husband's name. The doctor in my nightmare tells me I've had children. I can't remember this. My mind is a white snowbank of blank, and I am holding cards that should have memories on them instead of hieroglyphs I can't understand.

I fall back into self with a thud, and the only physical sensation I have is that I am much too tall. Is it possible to grow three feet while you're dreaming? I touch my head, and the soft fuzz there feels foreign. Like my brother's summer buzz cut when we were children.

My husband says, "Look at my glasses." So I do, I stare hard, but I still cannot remember marrying him. The buzzing in my ears drowns out the sounds and I see the light in a hard line on the floor as the children crack the bathroom door to see who is crying. It takes a moment to realize that it is me making that low moan.

So I lay back into flannel sheets and down comforter, and try to purge the nightmare from brain cells. I was drowning, falling, broken, bleeding. Others were hurt in my crash. Yet I am trying to walk, trying to look alright. A pastor in a flashy suit asks me if I am okay. Of course I am. Of course I am. I plod along to a river and soak my bloody feet in the dark bracken there.

I wake up still falling, and my husband is a stranger whose name I can't remember.

Oh, for sanity. I pray for sanity.

Grace in the discards

Writing here has been difficult; cancer looms large but I am called to proclaim the Cross more and more through this remarkable journey. I blog hop and scatter pebbles and crumbs and the readers come more and more slowly. Will you do me this favor, encourage me with a comment when you read this? You will grace me with your presence and response.

Keeping an online journal has hidden blessings: I hit "search", and, thanks to Google, realize that I have written about my messy house every October and November since I began writing in 2008. Really, this whole journal is full of Joy's life: unmasked project - the inner workings of the mind and the heart when faced with the large difficulties of life.

Even while I'm asleep, the chairs set out for devotions with my husband mock me with their piles of clean clothes and discarded summer quilts. I know it would take 15 minutes to clean up, but I spend that 15 minutes sleeping with my nightmares every day instead. He and I are like ships passing in the dawn in the dark anyway, too tired for anything beyond a quick and quiet romp in the sheets.

Hats litter my dresser, along with the remnants of my last shift working as a nurse, the watch ticking off time and the furry blue hat a reminder of hairlessness now a memory of three weeks past.

Just as Christ chooses to love me with all His heart instead of focusing on my flaws, I look past the mess to the yellow daisies in the antique milk bottle standing on the head of my bed.

Winter has come back again 

Feels like the season won't end 

My faith is dying tonight 

And I won't try to pretend 

I've got it all figured out 

I don't have any doubts 

I've got a busted heart 

I need You now Yeah, I need You now 

Hold on to me, hold on to me 

Don't let me lose my way 

Hold on to me 

I am the wandering son 

Your love is never enough 

I keep chasing the wind 

Instead of chasing Your love 

I'm screaming out Your name 

Don't let me fall on my face 

I've got a busted heart 

I'm in need of a change 

I'm desperate for grace 

Broke Your heart a thousand times 

But You've never left my side 

You have always been here for me 

You never let me go 

Until it comes to an end 

Soon this season will end 

I'll surrender tonight 

You meet me right where I am

~Busted Heart (Hold on To Me), For King & Country~

Sunday's ray of hope

Amy is doing better today after 18 hours on IV antibiotics. She is less sleepy and more talkative. The doctors just rounded and told us to expect to be in until Tuesday morning unless something changes for better or worse in her condition.

I wake up from nightmares wandering through hospital ICU's looking for my baby. I hold her realistic baby doll like a sack of potatoes from my arms and get glares from the nurses as I walk the halls. Finally, I find her. She is in horrible shape and her eyes have gone completely dead, no spark when she sees me. I am forced to go back to work and leave her there, listening to her screams echo the halls as I walk away. I sit up with a start and for a moment it all seems real. Then the hotel surroundings seep in and I realize I am left with only the remnants of visceral fear a nightmare leaves as memory and a pounding headache testament to late hours and way too much stress.

Ironically, the very verses I wrestle with during the "day to day" of our family's trials are the ones I cling to, repeating over and over throughout these hardest days. I will not give you more than you can bear. (I Corinthians 10:13)

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for He who promised is faithful. (Hebrews 10:23)

I can do all things through Christ who strengtheneth me. (Philippians 4:13)

I will offer up my life

In spirit and truth,

Pouring out the oil of love

As my worship to You

In surrender I must give my every part;

Lord, receive the sacrifice

Of a broken heart

Jesus, what can I give, what can I bring

To so faithful a friend, to so loving a King?

Savior, what can be said, what can be sung

As a praise of Your name

For the things You have done?

Oh my words could not tell, not even in part

Of the debt of love that is owed

By this thankful heart

You deserve my every breath

For You've paid the great cost;

Giving up Your life to death,

Even death on a cross

You took all my shame away,

There defeated my sin

Opened up the gates of heaven

And have beckoned me in

~I Will Offer Up My Life, Matt Redman~

Spiderweb sleep

A nightmare descends, all twisted up, pains of past and pains of present, and all the fear one length of sleep can heap on you.

You're lost in a maze of the subconscious, clawing up for air through layers of sleep, trying to escape terrors you've repressed, suppressed, redressed.

But sleep hangs on like the last tiny drop of ice melt to the tree branch, bent by the wind of your fear, but still persistent.

And then finally it's over and you're the lone bud climbing for the sunlight of early spring. You wake to memories appalling and chew them over all day trying to wrap arms around the lessons wrapped in the velvet darkness of the night.

Sometimes, after nights like these, the only thing that breaks the spell is the familiar. Verses memorized, prayers holy and hushed, said in unison. This morning, as I woke from my nightmare, it was the Lord's Prayer that pulled me gently back into the sunrise of love, that promise of every day, that no man controls, the orb of the sun pulling herself gently up the eastern sky and the moon putting himself gently to bed in the west.

Our Father, which art in heaven,

hallowed be thy name.

Thy kingdom come,

Thy will be done,

in earth, as it is in heaven.

Give us this day our daily bread,

and forgive us our trespasses,

as we forgive trespasses against us.

Lead us not into temptation,

but deliver us from evil.

For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory,

Forever and ever.

Amen.

(Matthew 6:9-13)

Rest in the exhaustion

It's one of those mornings when night gives way to dawn too soon, and we drag ourselves out of bed tired, pull the sleeping arms of children off our necks, and slide woolen stockinged feet over to the devotion chairs, our own private retreat in a bedroom too small. Crack spines on Bibles and open homework for our recovery group, and pray together. Interrupted as usual, half-way through, by the pitter-patter of feet coming to claim breakfast for growling tummies, the toddler-baby clamoring for a few more minutes cuddling under down with Mama.

The moon meets the rising sun across the cobalt sky, the stars shut out by the glistening dawn on newfallen stone. The big crater there feels like the hole in my heart, hungry always for more time with my lover and more time with the Lover of my soul. 

The juxtaposition of night and day a poignant reminder that time is short and redemption of it in short supply as well. We walk our days like prisoners, often, to routine, to schedule, to tasks. I am  the Taskmaster. The laundry folder, dish washer, floor scrubber, diaper changer, child tender. 

There must be more than this,

O breath of God come breathe within,

There must be more than this,

Spirit of God we wait for You.

Fill us anew we pray,

Fill us anew we pray.

Consuming fire fan into flame,

A passion for Your Name,

Spirit of God fall in this place,

Lord have Your way,

Lord have Your way with us,

Come like a rushing wind,

Clothe us with power from on high,

Now set the captives free,

Leave us abandoned to Your praise.

Lord let Your glory fall,

Lord let Your glory fall.

~Tim Hughes, as sung by Hillsong, Consuming Fire~

The craters on the moon like craters in my heart, always wanting more. Always wanting healing. Peace. Happiness. Injected with the culture from birth, inoculated against true joy and forever searching for pleasure instead. Yet in those empty places where I see the emptiness, He begins to fill. Little by little, the cup fills, and runs over.

To wake up early seems antithetical to rest. Indeed He says, It is in vain that you rise up early and go late to rest, eating the bread of anxious toil; for he gives to his beloved sleep. (Psalm 127:2) Then, too, in the consummate book of love, Song of Solomon, the lover tells his beloved, Let us rise early and go to the vineyards; Let us see whether the vine has budded And its blossoms have opened, And whether the pomegranates have bloomed. There I will give you my love. (7:12) And the Psalmist brings his petition early to the Lord: I rise before dawn and cry for help; I hope in your words. (Psalm 119:147)

So I rise early (most days). And find sleep, blessed or tormented, every night. And wonder at the miracle of rest He bestowed upon us, that renews us and finds us ready to face the next day. I have a history of sleep deprivation: working night shift, pulling all-nighters sometimes several times in a row in college, and I know that it is a spiral downward to sickness of body and soul.

And in the slow, incremental dance toward habit, my husband and I dance closer to together in the flickering pink light of dawn, and souls knit over the Word, and we come to peace with our journey together. God is good, always. Especially in this, this rising early, this going to bed at an ungodly hour (10 o'clock, people! My husband wants his night owl wife in bed at 10 o'clock! I often think it is a travesty...)

And in the between times, the night wakings, the nightmares, the torments in the darkness, I sit on the front steps in the cold and watch the stars in wonder, pinholes in the velvet blanket of the sky, and He heals my soul in the whisper of the wind and the blessed quietness.

Emotional rest is giving soul over to the hands of one in control, giving over exhaustion, confusion, chaos and pain to a God who understands and cries out with me. The God who nudges me out of bed in the  morning for devotions with my husband. The God who wakes me in the night to pray for those I love. The God who is slowly breaking down demons of my past, and shattering the walls self-built that only He can shatter, the walls that hedge me alone. He is bringing me out into the open for the first time in my life.

Blessed quietness, holy quietness,

what assurance in my soul,

on the stormy sea, He speaks peace to me,

and the billows cease to roll.

~Manie Ferguson, 1897~

Sweet dreams

We cover up for some rest.

Close our eyes.

The breathing slows...

And sometimes sleep is sweet.

And sometimes it isn't.

Right now my sleep, when it comes, is the playground for dark dreams.

And if your strife strikes at your sleep

Remember spring swaps snow for leaves

You'll be happy and wholesome again

When the city clears and sun ascends

~Winter Winds, Mumford & Sons~

It's no fun to be in dark places.

But here is where sanctification happens,

when we fall in love all over again

with the God who preserves us even when He doesn't rescue us.

Here's to the soon coming of spring.

Letters to Aaron: Skeletons in the Closet

When you first led me by the hand back down the aisle on our wedding day, it was the beginning of a trust I couldn't break. Lord knows, I fought it sometimes. I didn't realize that our marriage certificate wasn't a get-out-of-jail-free card for all our past mistakes. You brought your dysfunctional girlfriends into our house when you entered, and I kept all the demons of my past.

During the honeymoon stage, we hid our scars well. I think we were so thankful to have found each other that we almost forgot how life had bent us in the years before. After all, you'd never met a woman like me, and I'd never before been able to love a man like I did you. The haunting of our pasts felt ephemeral in the sunshine of new love. I didn't know how cold the ghost town of our hearts could get after nightfall.

I never thought to tell you, in the beginning, that I'd been abused as a child. I think I had grown so uncomfortable with the memory that I almost didn't believe it had happened myself. Living in the skin with a memory like that nearly killed me, and so I thought I had kicked it out for good. There was still an impression, like the hand print on a slapped child's cheek, left in my soul. Almost like a stain that's gone through the wash so many times you can't see it while you're folding the clothes - it only becomes apparent when the fabric drapes off your shoulders while it's worn.

I guess I tried to compensate by having you fill the black hole left by that past. You were so good at loving me, I thought that was what a good husband would do. But the bigger my void became, the more you shied away, until we were like two molecules under intense heat, skipping off each other after the briefest touch. I kept running toward you, and every time you ran away, I ran faster and held you tighter. I think you were scared because you knew that, no matter what you did, it would always be the wrong fit for the size hole I was trying to fill. You were, in essence, damned if you did, and damned if you didn't. You felt it, and so you curled up into yourself. All for the sake of not hurting me.

Every time your rejection was even implied, it was like another nail in the coffin, sealing my secret up tighter and tighter, until I didn't even realize it was still there. I thought it had been buried and replaced with newer, fresher pains and joys. We even got to the point where we talked about the issues in our marriage - me demanding and you withdrawing - and you made your peace with the tenacity of my need for you, and I tried to avoid your triggers so you'd stay present. It worked for a while, but it was kind of like covering the stench of a dead body with funeral lilies. We'd just been in the room with the smell so long we'd quit smelling it. You'd long ago quit asking, and I'd long ago quit looking for answers that deep in the caverns of my heart.

Then the whole church debacle exploded the mine that had been laying underneath that coffin all along. The nails vaporized in the blast, and there we were with a dead body in our laps in all it's putrid reality. I remember the moment I watched your heart break in two as I told you about it. And I just kept scrubbing and scrubbing and scrubbing, seriously just seconds shy of true madness, trying to get the stink out.

It happened just recently, in the past few months: we're finally looking at a gravestone instead of an open grave. I don't know how to explain it outside of God's grace. Certainly it could be the year of therapy, the dozens of books I've read, the friends who've surrounded us with love, the pastors who've preached about the binding up of the brokenhearted. It's strange, as I look back on all of this - and wonder why I didn't just do the work sooner. But no one can plow a field in winter, and if you try to plant then, you'll fail. We had to get through the howling snowfalls to get to this season.

Grace is the glue of life. Under intense heat, molecules normally just skitter off each other, like we did early on. But there is a magic temperature for two elements, when all of the sudden, in a miraculous, instantaneous transformation, the two become one. For us, that temperature was extremely high. So high it nearly burnt this whole life of ours to the ground before it ever bonded us together. Now, on the other side of the Bunsen burner, I can look back and say, "That's what God was doing." He was making two into one.

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,

Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God’s great Judgment Seat;

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,

When two strong [persons] stand face to face, tho’ they come from the ends of the earth. 

(Rudyard Kipling)

This week's prompt: "Outside Influences" really hit me hard.
Joining Amber, Seth, Joy and Scott

Also part of Project 1:3