Life, pain, and making lemonade

You know, sometimes life throws you a curve ball. I don't speak sports, but I'm pretty sure that means "something unexpected". And then I have to ask myself, how unexpected can it be? There's a guy right in front of you, throwing a ball. How many variables are there? Excluding meteors or other outside interventions, of course. He throws the ball and it should come somewhere around the bat, and if you are more gifted than I am, you hit said ball with the bat. No mystery.

But life, sometimes life is genuinely surprising. Like death, for example. Death is always surprising. You could be expecting someone to die for years, have the burial plots and sit through the illness and then they're suddenly dead and it's shocking, every time.





Nobody has died around here. I just have 2 hours to myself and I am being introspective or philosophical or something.

My first 20 years of life were pretty perfect. Then, at 20, God was all like, "She is ready," in His James Earl Jones voice and then I had continual crises for like, 10 years or something.  And in the storm of those years, I clung to God and I kicked at God, questioned and blamed and accused God, ran to God and, in retrospect, was carried by God. C.S. Lewis said, “God whispers in our pleasures, but shouts in our pain.” Because in the crisis, with the sirens and the screaming and the questioning, He can be heard. God is with us. I know that better now than I ever did in my "perfect" life. There is grace for the moment.

In grief, you feel like you will die, just from the hurt, but there's a moment, right before you get swept out to sea, where it lifts for a moment and you can breathe. You can believe, for a moment, that you will laugh again. That's grace, so much grace.

And life, so much of life, is what you make of it. Maybe you're a victim, and you didn't choose your crisis. You still have power, to choose how to respond, how to live in the light of your "new normal". You can choose, here, despite what you face. In my darkest moments, and there were moments when I begged for death, there was a light, a faint light in the deep. Don't give up.

I don't even know who I'm writing this for. But in your crisis, in your deep, believe me. There is hope, and you're going to be okay. Even if everything is wrong, you will be okay.

“Experience: that most brutal of teachers. But you learn, my God do you learn.”- C.S. Lewis