On Starts and Stops

This week has been one full week!  A neighborhood dog bit me, I’m undergoing rabies shots, we celebrated fourteen years of marriage, we celebrated Chilean Independence, the kids had a week off of school, and then yesterday, my pony kicked Gibby in the mouth.

I don’t know how much more I could add to this list.  Except that in the midst of all that, we’re doing well.  We’re finding our stride, in starts and stops.  I think that’s the nature of transition.

We’re getting ready for our trip to the States, I’m finishing up the edits for Waters (thank God) and we’re building the foundation for the new house.  The kids are hanging out with friends, playing, and we’re all enjoying the onset of Spring.

In the middle of all this, I’ve been thinking about transition.  Transition is the in-between, when you’re not all the way settled, but you’re not where you used to be either.  You don’t fit in either place anymore.  Six months ago, I thought almost every day about going back to the States.  I wondered if we’d made the right decision in moving to Chile.  You read about these secret thoughts (not so secret) almost every week.  Thank you for putting up with my back and forth blogs.  We’ve hung on, determined to make it through the transition period.  Wise friends wrote me and said it is really hard to settle into a place – it takes a couple of years.

In the last few weeks I’ve felt a shift in my very deep places.  And I’m not looking back so many times a day, but rather forward.

And here’s what I’m learning through all of this.  Sometimes you just need to wait.  The thing is, as a human race, we have this tendency to avoid feeling uncomfortable.  We love our pain-killers, our little tricks to numb everything, don’t we?  We shift around in starts and stops, buy a new purse, or new boots, or get a hair-cut, take up sewing or spinning, find a boyfriend, break up with a boyfriend, pluck our eye-brows, lose five pounds, gain five pounds, pluck our eyebrows again, text fifteen people in ten minutes because we’re lonely, (I’ve never done that, I swear) read ridiculous romance novels, (I’ve never done that either, I promise), or eat and eat and eat dark chocolate, milk chocolate, or chocolate covered peanuts (definitely haven’t eaten those).

We do all these things to escape those horrible feelings of being sad or lonely or hurt.  And while we’re working so hard to avoid all those feelings, the truth is, what we need to do is just feel sad, or lonely, and grieve it, or just sit and be uncomfortable in the middle of it, or be mad, or be whatever and FEEL it.  We are guided through the valley of the shadow of death … we aren’t guided around it.

I’m not saying sewing or spinning is bad.  I’m saying sewing and spinning can’t make the season you’re living in go away.

Life is hard, incredibly hard.  Life is also beautiful, incredibly beautiful.  This is our tension.  This is our paradox.  This is what we will always hold in our hands – the terrible awful pain of living in a broken world, and the terrible awesome reality that there is beauty around every corner if we’d but wake up and pay attention.  I can’t pay attention, I can’t be awake to beauty, or other people’s lives, to their pain, to their hurt, to their suffering, if I’m fighting like hell to avoid my own.  Compassion and real love (the kind of love that actually wants what is best for the people around us) comes through the suffering, not in spite of it or around it.

I can’t say I won’t write another blog where I’m wondering what the heck I’m doing in Chile.  That would be too much to hope for … but I can say that it’s shifting.  I’m seeing a beauty here I haven’t seen before.  I’m experiencing a grace and hope I couldn’t get to before.  I was too busy grappling for solid ground, for my place.

When word got out I’d been bitten by a dog the other day, many friends here called to see how I was doing.  In the middle of all that mess, I saw pieces of my solid ground.  I have friends who care I’d been bitten by a dog and they reached out one by one.  We went to the clinic and I got my shots.  The kids had a sleepover and loved it.  I went for a run yesterday.  The sun is out and the birds are chirping.  My dog is in surgery – and my veterinarian friend is with him.  There’s beauty and sorrow intermingled in all of that … and it’s solid.  It’s real life being lived day by day at the very end of the world.

I have had to hang on through terrible nights of loneliness to get here.  And I’m sure I’ll have lonely feelings again – probably very soon, maybe later today – because life is lonely.  I’m discovering, it’s okay to feel lonely.  It’s in the middle of loneliness that many of us begin to search for God and learn to hear His voice.  It’s in the middle of loneliness that we reach out for one another and discover the glorious riches of community, and the treasure of true friendship.  It’s in the middle of loneliness that we find rest in a whole different way if we let loneliness teach us its lessons.  Loneliness is a part of being human.  And I’m becoming more human.

Much Love,

Tina