Grief

The Daily

July 9, 2023 by Susi Forshey 2 Comments

Lately my evening ritual consists of cramming the last 3 hours before I sleep with TV. I feel an urge to live someone else’s television life that includes a great deal of beauty, emotional connectedness, comfort, and meaning. I watch Fashion shows, dance shows, comedy. I wake up the next morning feeling rather numb to the life I actually live. I mostly stay within my physical realm of Home. I keep things as orderly and as beautiful as possible. I feed, I soothe, I wipe, I litigate, I feel the grit again under my heels. I feel by the end of the day that I have merely circled my Realm endlessly poking and prodding these Realities to try to make them shine or glow with comfort or simply just settle.

God, I am missing you. Once, at night in my bed, I saw your beautiful, bright face. Why is it so hard to see it in the day? Why does it require so much stillness, of which I have none? Can you be found in the chaos of children’s voices and needs, in the huddle of mess, creativity, and hunger? How do I find you, Lord, in Management? Did you manage people? What was it like when you were in charge of travel preparations for Twelve? Did you send out huge vibes of Glorious Beauty when you said, “Good morning,” and served your friends breakfast? When you washed the disciples’ feet, how did you find the towels you needed for this job? Was it with magnificence and meaning? Did they just appear?

How do you maintain your holiness while holding a whining toddler’s head above the soapy water? (Your watch is getting wet.) While downing the 12th set of pills in the day to feel some relief from my pain (did I take this one already?), can I, can I touch the hem of your garment? And will it change me?

Two things I know. I have a great hole in me that longs for something Beautiful and Heavy with Meaning.

It is rarely, rarely full.

Disrupted

November 25, 2022 by Susi Forshey 2 Comments

There is this intrusion in growth…there is death in new life. The moving aside of the comfortable to make room for the New. Hope is there…existing quietly inside the uncomfortable space of torn-down walls and bared plaster, newly revealed x-rays and sonograms with bad news…just existing…while holding onto the imagination of something beautiful yet to be. She is tenacious….the “song” of feathered fragility from a throat of determination, through a powerful breast throbbing with—

But the ugliness of a disrupted nest. Of a disrupted womb. Of a disrupted body…a body intended for eternal strength and creativity, disrupted by age and death and injury and brown slime that creeps over nerve endings, making the loveliest of memories fade into meaningless static.

Death. Death comes before Life. Sorrow before joy. Always sorrow before joy. Night before morning. Babies are born after wombs shudder and tremble and fall and burst and erupt and writhe and— “Aaalright, I’ll just die, then,” I said to myself when my last daughter was crowning. I gave over my body to the pain, I resisted no longer, I gave over to death for a moment….just a moment, and then plop—she was born. In the twinkling of an eye, after months of bearing and mourning and sorrow in carrying, in making room, in giving her space inside me, in moving my flesh aside for her. I finally died and gave up my body and there she was. Brand new.

I feel this same thing again now. My x-ray revealed a fractured spine. It’s old, they said. It’s not going to heal. It’s slipping and will just get worse as you age. Now I am once again making room for a new sorrow. I have given over my flesh to something else uncomfortable and overpowering. Now I must move over to a softer part of the couch, and adjust my posture, and change my shoes, and say No to long walks, and refuse to bend over and pick up one million things off the floor. I must close the door on ever being athletic again. I must lie down with the pain and sleep with the pain and dream with the pain and wake with the pain. But Hope lives there, too. I feel the movement of some kind of Life within, the disruption that Life inside earthen vessels must make.

“There is a crack, a crack in every thing! That’s how the light gets in.”

Somewhere out beyond or hidden deep within is a stirring, a strange stirring of some unseen hope. It promises a tiny thing now, but I see in my imagining that it carries a great weight, a heavy and true promise. I know Who put it there, and Who tends it. I see it not at all, but I trust the Planter, whose promises are true. It was He who said to the man, “Stretch out your hand!” and he was healed.

And so, I sit. Disrupted. And, like Mary, I await the birth of something New.

Approaching Psalm 23

February 24, 2020 by Susi Forshey 1 Comment

Once my friend said to me, “And then the Worst Thing actually happened,” on her father dying. She said also, “When things get calm I feel like I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop.” I think I finally understand her in this, because I think I’ve discovered that it is me, too. I’m beginning to see that I, too, have my fists still clenched in my lap, two years after the fall of our home business and our descent into years of “Famine.”

The violence with which Sin broke into our lives and shook us to our depths has left such a permanent wound that the current provisions of God in our lives —like a future salvation, home, a pretty Ok health, some friends here and there, and food whenever we want it—provisions like these feel wan and weak when compared to a childhood trapped on a lonely farm, forbidden love, searing loneliness, lost parents, and much-needed love and affirmation withheld from us and replaced with wanton criticism and anger as children. “I want it to be real,” she said. And I say, “I want it to be bigger, stronger, louder, and sweeter than my Past.”

Basically, having to live among the corpses, my own included, has challenged the fabric of my faith. It feels worn and thin and lacking delight now that it has been challenged by the monster shadows of my past I’m daily living in.

I started reading Dallas Willard’s book on Psalm 23, “Life Without Lack.” This part of the Introduction worries me: “I have more than my cup will hold. So much that I can be as generous as my shepherd without fear of ever running out.” I am NOT this way. I hold onto things. I worry. I wonder almost hourly if there will be enough. Enough for my kids, enough for our friends, enough for guests, enough for my soul, enough to make it through another church service without offending someone. I wonder if there’s enough grace for me to not return to suicidal tendencies by continuing to live here in these Shadowlands. I live in fear of what other drastic means for sanctification God will use against me next. I live in fear that He will take away my son or my daughter in order to teach me to better value the time I now have with them.

When I look around my house and my yard and hear the woodpeckers and sparrows and see the green buds peeking out, I think, “Does my cup run over?” And my heart answers, “No. this is not for you. It is not yours. The land is someone else’s. You must serve here forever and there is no hope of possessing it.” I feel exiled to another world, where I must serve in someone else’s home. Just like when I was a child. I lived in the house, but I wasn’t allowed to do anything to the land, the flower beds, the walls, the furniture. It was my dad’s. And we did it all his way, all his stuff, always….everything.

Why does the Trauma of the Past hold so tightly to us? How can one event or one season so permanently set a person’s heart to think a certain way? Cannot the gospel change my broken heart? How have I lived with it in my head so long and not felt its warmth? Why does my cup feel dangerously empty all the time? What drains it so?

I have often found myself reading promises in the scripture and felt myself say, “but that is not for you. That is for someone else.” I would never say to someone, “Today was great! God has crowned me with loving kindness and tender mercies and satisfied my mouth with good things.”

Well, then I turned a few more pages in the book, and I read these words: “People are obsessed with themselves. This is often caused by the wounds they have received. When you hit your thumb with a hammer, what happens in the following days? You are very mindful of your thumb. The same is true when we are hurt; we become conscious of ourselves to such an extent that we are imprisoned in that consciousness.” Herein I sense is a central and salvific truth for me. Dealing with wounds and pain is only half the story. It is necessary to attend the wound, to curate and asses one’s griefs, as John Piper once said, “Occasionally, weep deeply over the life that you hoped would be. Grieve the losses. Feel the pain. Then wash your face, trust God, and embrace the life that he’s given you.” Here on this blog you will find me weeping deeply over what I have lost. I naturally tend to curate my griefs through writing. But the washing of the face and trusting and embracing is hard. But I must do that here, too. It requires courage. This blog is to be my Courage Blog. To face fears, tend griefs and wounds, and then wash my face and courageously embrace what is my Today.