Bathrooms & Wal Mart

It's not every day I have something good to say about Wal Mart. Actually, I'm not sure I ever have, as I've always been more of a Target kinda girl. I mean a store that has a website entirely dedicated to pictures of the types of "customers"...you can't blame me.

But I have to give credit where it's due, and Wal Mart made me jump up and down laughing and squealing like a five year old in the middle of the aisle. Happy tears streamed down my cheeks & before I had the chance to act like a normal person & hush my face I looked up and yelled "THANK YOU!" I then regained my composure and wiped my face with the thought "who cares, no one in here is normal anyways" as visions of women with curly brown fingernails wearing shorts 10 sizes too small flooded my mind.

What prompted this emotional dance party, you ask?

 Rewind to "The 25th Day" post & you'll find my most desperate pleas took place on my bathroom floor. I begged God with everything in me to let my boy live. I promised I'd sit with him in the hospital for months. I pounded the floor. I sat in a daze wondering if it was real. I believed with everything in me that God would answer these requests. He had to. And then when I walked out to hear that He hadn't, my moments of raw, spilling out my heart, God listen to me prayer, turned into feelings of unimportance. Did my God have better things to do?

 I've since hated going into my bathroom. In the immediate days that followed his death, I couldn't stand to be alone, I felt scared and vulnerable. I especially didn't want to walk into the bathroom alone. It reminded me of my intimate moments with God and I filled with anger as I wondered why He ignored me. I would ask my husband to walk in there with me, I thought if I walked in there alone, we'd either have to remodel the bathroom, or I'd never come back out.

So after months and months of walking into this room that reminded me of unanswered, minuscule, unimportant to God prayers, I decided to look for some new decor in hopes of sweeping these bad memories under a new rug. But God..well He's funny. He wasn't about to leave me hangin with some seashell soap dish that had no meaning. Nope. There were butterflies! Brown & blue butterflies. A shower curtain with little blue butterfly shower curtain holders! AND in the middle of all of this goodness, HIS WORD:
BELIEVE
"If you have faith as a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, be moved from this place to that; and it will be moved, and nothing will be impossible to you." Matthew 17:20
TRUST
"Trust in the Lord with all your heart; and lean not to your own understanding." Proverbs 3:5
PRAISE
"Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the earth: make a loud noise, and rejoice, and sing praise." Psalm 98:4
SERVE
"But as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord." Joshua 24:15

He heard me. He heard my cries & he cares. "You are the God of my story, write every line for your glory." This chapter hasn't been pretty, but I can always find the beauty in it because I'm not writing it... & the Author is far from finished.

(for those who may not know, brown & blue were the colors worn at Isaiah's memorial. We released blue butterflies that day for him to signify his new life. "What a caterpillar calls the end, a butterfly calls the beginning.") I've since become a huge fan of all things butterfly.

It's okay to cry, but much more fun to dance

"Heyyyy, how are you?"..."Good!" We exchange smiles and awkwardly pretend we're looking at our phones or trying to find our children so we can escape what would inevitably be a clumsily strung together conversation that we'd rather just avoid for fear of not knowing what to say. 

Or would it be? 

"What do you say to a person who's had a child die? 

What if she cries?

 I really want to ask how she's doing, but I'm not sure if I should bring it up."

If these thoughts sound familiar, you are not alone! In fact, I'm writing this just for you! 

Truth: When I say I'm "good", that means that I'm moving on with life just like everyone else. It means that I'm embracing what it is to have a child so close to my heart but so far from my arms. It means that some days, my heart aches for him, and others I can think of him and smile. It means that he is just as much a part of our family as I am. No child's drawing is without him. He's never left out of bedtime prayers. He even "sat" on Santa's lap for Christmas pictures. He's so much a part of our family that the only thing that's missing is his body. 

Truth: My heart bursts every time someone asks about him. I don't care if I cry, I cry anyways. You aren't bringing anything up that I don't think about daily. It reminds me that I'm not the only one that thinks of him. It reminds me that his short life created a ripple effect in this big world and that I'll never know how much he's impacted this world this side of Heaven. I can't explain how much it meant to be asked about Isaiah in the middle of Elijah's gingerbread house party in his Kindergarten class. (you know who you are:). The tears fell and some 5 year olds stared, but my heart was overjoyed to talk about this healing process and to know that someone cared enough to ask. 

Truth: I was angry for awhile. The best way I can explain grief is that I feel like I'm walking through a minefield with a blindfold on. Just as I start to gain some confidence, something unexpected happens and BOOM. There goes my leg and I'm laying on the floor in his room for hours trying to recover. 

Truth: If I had been without a Savior, I'd still be maintaining a life without Isaiah. I'd still have three kids to tend to, and I would undoubtedly know the value of each day I get to spend with them. BUT! Those minefields I travel through would have mentally blown me to pieces. If there was no calm in the storm, no light in the darkness, no rest for the weary, no hope that I'll see my boy again, no promise that he's safe in the arms of the very One I cry out to in agony, this journey wouldn't be worth taking. If my Ava crawled into my lap, sobbing while she recounted the details that she witnessed on that night, and I wasn't able to calm her with the promise that her baby brother is alive & made whole, I would have given up. 

Truth: God is right here. This isn't some fairy tale or sweet thoughts to think about...but I have to be honest that I haven't always felt Him. The biggest lesson I have learned in this journey is that I need to be intentional. For awhile I sat idly, putting minimum effort into digging into His Word, or finding healing for myself, because I thought it just took time. I didn't have the energy for much, and so I waited. And waited and waited. Until I finally realized that all I was doing was waiting to wake up one day and have the energy to be the mom, wife, child of God, and person I wanted to be. Ring ring. That was my wake up call. Intentionally seeking God with everything inside of me..reading, praying, singing, reading, admitting I'm not ok, tearing down the walls that I started to build to guard my heart. All that stuff, yeah it's working. So when you ask me how I am and I say "good", what I really mean is "alive"... and I haven't felt that way in 8 months. 

& sometimes we mess up.

Here sits in front of me, my new planner for the year. It's blank pages that have not been filled with plans and appointments and birthdays, usually give me a sense of excitement. Every year I go store to store searching for the perfect planner that will serve as my time organizer, a place to scribble down phone numbers, and shopping lists, something that gives me a sense of security knowing that in those pages, my year has had purpose.

 I like to look back through old ones and reminisce about the lunch dates I had forgotten about, laugh at my my side notes to myself such as "Jetta had a poo disaster today. Better luck tomorrow!", and know that in the midst of all of those appointments and schedules and daily struggles, there was LIFE in my days.

 I came across my planner from 2012 a couple weeks ago, and my eyes started to fill with tears before I even opened it. I knew that I would find page after page of hope and excitement and anticipation. I wanted to remember what that felt like, to be alive. I slowly flipped through the pages, smiling at baseball games, VPK graduation, OB appointments with the side note "glucose tests are the WORST!"...like I could ever forget that. And then came April. I nervously turned the page and saw "Isaiah's birthday! Be there at 5:30!!"  I even got my planner out in the hospital to scribble "my sweet boy was born at 7:54!" I not only wrote down all of his appointments, but I had gone ahead to each week and wrote how many weeks he was. I didn't stop at 3. I kept going, all year. And then the end of April came, and there was nothing. I don't remember shoving it in the corner of my closet, but I can see why I did. My year was filled with anticipations of him. 

I started to adapt the mindset that the root of all disappointment is expectation. If I didn't expect anything, if I didn't hope for anything, then I'd never be hurt again. Recently, I realized that this idea is stupid. Somewhere along the way I forgot that God works all things together for our good! I don't have to be afraid to hope or to plan as long as I have faith that God is in control, and even when something falls apart and I have to scribble out that whole rotten day, He's waiting for me with a clean slate on the next day. So today, without fear of the unknown, but with faith in God's perfect will for my life, I will happily hope again. I will write birthdays and anniversaries, appointments and milestones, and I will choose to give these 358 days to the One who first gave them to me! Happy New Year & happy hoping!