There’s a t-shirt I’ve seen that reads “I speak in fluent
movie quotes.” This is so me. Ask any of my friends and they will tell you that
far too many of my sentences begin, “That’s like that episode of…” or “That’s
like that movie…” or “Have you heard that song where….” What’s funny is that I
think like that, too. And sometimes, God even uses those images that are
trapped in my head or those lines to speak to me.
I sometimes feel like that when I get overwhelmed these
days. There’s a part of me, sometimes but not often, that wants to scream. It
wants to stomp my feet and throw a fit worthy of a three-year-old. Having my
helper, my husband, my partner suddenly ripped from my life right as my
children are becoming busy teens isn’t fair. Six months ago when my sisters
came to grieve with me, they made me an offer I kind of wish I would have
accepted. They offered to drive out into the Black Hills someplace and let me
scream at the unfairness of it all until my throat was raw. I didn’t do it then
and I didn’t do it today.
Maybe it would be cathartic. Mostly, though, I fear it would
mean admitting defeat. I would feel it would be as immature as a small child,
even if nobody else heard me. Or perhaps it would just open a floodgate of emotions.
Don’t get me wrong—I’m not hiding from my grief. I cry and I feel sad. But I do
not wallow and giving in to this seems like wallowing.
Tonight’s trigger was too many scheduled things at once and
having to talk my 15-year-old through finishing dinner and trusting him to
serve his siblings while I had to run to work later than was normal. It wasn’t
even the worst day I’d had like this. But I was exhausted and as I drove to
work, the split-screen fight was waging in my head. I’m pretty sure the one
side might have been as ugly as Gollum. But it’s the smaller side.
I mean, I have friends who are doing the single parenting
thing off and on and they don’t get to pitch a fit. Two of my friends have
husbands working for the railroad. They can be gone 36 hours, home for 12, and
gone again. Another has a husband gone in the oil fields for two to three weeks
at a time. I have military wives as friends. They are doing this and therefore
I do not feel I have the right to throw a pity party.
Instead I needed to put on my smile and go record my voice
in a professional manner for the radio show I do. I needed to announce coming
events and toss in some personal banter all with a smile in my voice so there
didn’t need to be a schizophrenic fight lurking beneath the surface. Suck it up, Jenn.
But as the show went on, I think God was gently nudging me
back to a place where I wasn’t focused on how hard this was. To be honest,
working as a DJ at a Christian station means a lot of times the song titles are
just words I’m reading. But not tonight. The very songs I was announcing were
gentle reminders of God’s presence in this life I’m living.
As I continued to struggle to keep the toddler inside me
from pitching that fit the songs kept speaking to my heart. “Be My Rescue” by
Nicole Nordeman and “Lord I Need You” by Matt Maher echoed that when the stress
starts to overwhelm and exhaust me, I know where to turn. The tears were close
to the surface now for a different reason. I knew that God knows this stinks.
He knows this is hard and it’s gonna take time to figure it out. He knows it’s
taking all my strength some days to keep moving forward.
And then I came to a song that reached me in another dark
moment of my life. It was a day when my youngest child was having an MRI to see
if she could handle open-heart surgery. She was three days old. In that moment
of absolute helplessness to do anything for her, God sent me a song by Third
Day, “Call My Name.”
Maybe there will come a day when I need to scream at the unfairness of it all—of losing my husband of twenty years with no warning, of having to care for four kids all by myself on the hectic nights when friends are too busy to help, of grief just not being fair. But not tonight. I just needed some reminders of who God is and where He is. I just needed to call His name.
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