Let’s just say that our house was never featured on anyone’s Pinterest board. Nor was it ever the chosen location for anyone’s baby/bridal shower. Twice, in fact, separate friend-groups staged an intervention in response to my pioneering pastor-man’s stress level.

Life is hard. Why make it even harder? I don’t like stress, I hate what it does to my husband, and I fear its affect on my children. So it’s tempting to create protective barriers that ensure my preferred calm life rhythm and give the illusion of a “balanced” life. Isn’t that what we are taught to value?

“No one can really spare a woman the process of labor,” the doula muses. Pale and dehydrated, she herself is hooked up to an IV in an overflowing labor ward, nearing the end of her own excruciating pregnancy.

The final storm is approaching;

Hellish stressors, diseases, and lies.

The dreams we held as human rights,

Torn from us, pulverized.

Hurting

I tumble into bed with knots in my stomach and grief in my throat. Dear people with good intentions lost in labyrinths of longings and allegiances. I love them. I can’t fix it. I can’t sleep. I can’t…

Maybe you are single, and as the dreaded day approaches, you just want to escape from the glossy pink and red advertisements everywhere that shove in your face that you are “missing out.”

Heavy and icky, a sense of doom presses down on me. At night, it jerks me from my sleep with scenes from what-if scenarios raising my pulse as efficiently as any horror move while endless do-do lists scroll like credits in the background.

It’s been 23 years since these words first pierced me with promises I didn’t understand: “Ask the Lord for rain in the time of the latter rain.” (Zechariah 10:1a)

If 2014 treated you harshly, you are not alone. So many solid, sincere souls echo the shared lamentation: This year was rough! Not just “I’m exhausted/disappointed/stressed out” rough – no, this was the kind of wicked, whipping torment more akin to a hurricane relentlessly pounding on people already shipwrecked, just barely holding on to the remnants of their man-made security for sheer survival.

Some cheer. Some mourn. All of us sense that this is just the surface of things, as the flames of St. Louis ignite dry timbers everywhere. Anger, injustice, helplessness, and bewilderment fuel the fire from all directions, and the rising roar reveals gaping wounds in our nation.

“Miles and miles away, My Darling,” her smokey, dreamy voice breathes golden melancholy into my indigo evening. “But in the blue of morning the break of dawn has come / And I’m watching the horizon / Where yesterday has gone.”

That sobering moment when an ever-so-slight awareness from the periphery explodes into the center focus of harsh reality… when the irritating voices you try to shoo away as they interfere with your semi-slumber, finally arouse you into enough alertness that you realize they’ve already been fighting for your attention for awhile.

Waiting is a womb pregnant with hope and fear. Worst case scenarios wrestle with words of promise, and through it, a deeper yielding grows inside.

Who would have known that a memorial service could be this life-infusing?! Honoring her by wearing happy colors rather than garments of mourning, we gathered with a vague feeling that this would be intense and “inspirational,” but we had no idea what we were in for.

My current battle began slowly and mostly undetected. My man’s time and attention were spread thinner and thinner, and simultaneously, so were my hormones. But what was what? More than two decades of ministry had trained us well in weighing the different priorities and costs, and arriving together at satisfying solutions.

Since his traumatic birth (10 lbs 3 oz), my son had exhibited all the symptoms of ADHD with increasing intensity. At four, he began to refer to himself by the adjectives he overheard me use when describing him. “I’m a wild child.”

I miss her voice the most. Like sunlight shimmering in a gently streaming rivulet, her words illuminated my soul with a glow that both comforted and inspired me. Oddly, I simultaneously relaxed into a deep sense of home and felt my chest swell with a burst of fresh adventure when I was with her.

Dusk wraps us in a cooling embrace as we trudge along the river together, singing, and the crickets chirp louder as an orange moon begins its rise into the star-studded night sky. Leaving behind familiarity for adventure has quickly fused into a vibrant family these seven indigenous youths from the jungle village of Juancito and we seven visitors from the States.

After a wonderful whirlwind of a summer, the kind that tempts me to list it all to earn your empathy for why I am this tired, I find myself questioning the decision to join this physically strenuous journey to a people whose language I don’t speak.

We are gathered here today for my son’s, my first-born’s, wedding. An hour from now, the word “mine” for David will primarily belong to his breathtaking bride, and I taste salt at the thought. “Thank you for raising the man of my dreams,” she wrote me, ever thoughtful, tender, generous.