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*** Scroll down for parts 1, 2, and 3

Three weeks after my dad passed away, my friend Darilynn called to see if I needed some tlc. With an open and grateful heart, I said yes, and we made plans for her to come over that afternoon. When she graciously offered to bring lunch for us, I ditched the polite “no-thank-you-so-as-not-to-impose” response that formed on my tongue and simply replied, “Yes, that would be wonderful.” She and I had been together through some losses before. I felt no need to pretend I had it all together or make things look better than they were.

An hour and a half later, she showed up at my door, a large bowl filled with homemade salad for lunch, fresh zucchini, and yellow squash from her garden to share with our family, and a hug that invited the release of the tears held loosely behind my eyelids. She dished up lunch as I settled my toddler in bed for his afternoon nap.

We spread out at the dining room table and chatted over lunch. Just small talk, nothing big. The gift of normalcy did my heart good, and I ate with an interest I had not had in days. The delicious salad worked its magic, and before long, I felt strength entering my body.

After the plates were emptied and put in the sink, I suggested we take our topped-off glasses of iced tea outside and sit at the patio table on the deck. It was a gorgeous early August afternoon—not too hot, just warm enough for iced tea to feel refreshing. For a few minutes, neither of us spoke. It was a comfortable silence, each of us sipping from our glass, appreciating the quiet of the peaceful afternoon. I pulled the peace into my lungs and held it for a moment before releasing my breath in a gentle sigh. At that moment, a realization startled me. God was there. Just right there, sitting with us in that pocket of peace. He was quiet, but the effect of His presence was palpable.

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Sometimes, we complicate the idea of the presence of God. Even in my head while typing that phrase, I pictured myself saying the words aloud, chin dipped toward the floor, tongue pressing down toward the back of my throat to make my voice deeper. (Picture James Earl Jones.)  Like I’m making a deeply religious statement about the mysteries of life. But God being with us was never meant to be a mystery. The presence of God is, simply put, God being present with us. It’s not mystical, not magical. It’s actually fairly basic. It is literally the fundamental element of our entire existence. (That doesn’t make it sound mysterious at all, does it?!) 

But it is simple. In its most basic form – I’m talking preschool level here – God created us. He loves His creation. He enjoys being with His creation. God is with His creation. Now, let’s get personal. God created me. He loves me. God enjoys being with me. God is with me.

I’m telling you – it’s a game changer.

The knowledge that God is truly hanging out with me during my regular day, just there with me in whatever I am doing, changed things. I started to actually see Him more. The more I saw Him, the more I recognized Him. The more I recognized Him, the more I knew Him. The more I knew Him, the more I expected Him. And the more I expected Him, the more I saw Him. (See the circle?)

For many years, during the time we lived in Maine, my friend Stephanie and I would meet once a week for coffee. On a regular basis you could find us enjoying coffee at the Tim Horton’s on Alfred Road in Biddeford, Maine. (Tim Hortons is no longer there, and the day they closed was a day of mourning for us.)  Sometimes, we would meet after dropping our kids off at school for a blissful hour or two of grown-up time, and sometimes, we would have our littles there with us. Whatever the case, it was a date we rarely missed. You could say our friendship was built during those weekly times of sharing hearts, lots of laughter, and sometimes tears. Oh, and the coffee. Yes. That too.

Stephanie would often get the same drink order a few weeks in a row and then change it up from time to time. But me? Once I found a drink I fell in love with, that was it for me. That became the drink I wanted every time. Enter the delightfully desserty, medium, iced cappuccino supreme, made the “original” way, with cream instead of chocolate milk, and a shot of caramel. I remember when they started making the iced-capp supreme with chocolate milk instead of cream. I immediately noticed something was off and asked about it. The manager told me they had changed the recipe, but for me, they could keep making it the “original” way. It got to the point that I didn’t even have to order. When the employees saw me come in, they made my drink without asking. They had gotten to know me and knew what I wanted. It was all there, right inside the circle of seeing, recognizing, knowing, and expecting.

In much the same way, I started to recognize God showing up in my daily life. There He was, floating on the words of a conversation, warming my face with sunshine, taking my breath away with a show-stopping sunset, filling my mind with scriptures in the darkness of night.

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I once heard a therapist say that when we focus all our attention on a problem, it will appear bigger to us because our solo focus enlarges it like a magnifying glass. Magnification is the process of enlarging the appearance of something, not the actual size of it. So, as we sit and stare at a problem, it will become bigger and bigger because it has been given the entirety of our focus. And in giving it our focus, we are no longer able to see things outside of it.

She gestured to the open window in her office a few feet away from me. It was a beautiful spring day in late April, and a gentle breeze stirred the crisp white curtains, the faint aroma of the flowers growing outside the building wafting through the room. Birds chirped from the trees bordering the parking lot. The temperature was the perfect blend of warm and cool that on any other day would have been inviting me, begging me, to spread out on my porch swing with a good book.

But I couldn’t see it, couldn’t recognize it- until she interrupted my focus.

THIS is what I could see from my vantage point that day:  Four walls and a door. I knew that there were windows, but I paid them no attention and did not notice the open one. I sat in a chair with a tiny round table to the left of me. The room felt small, almost claustrophobic. I could not get comfortable. I kept wondering if I should sit with my legs crossed. That’s my normal go-to pose. (As I sit here typing at the outdoor patio of a local Starbucks I have them crossed.) But does that seem too uncaring, too relaxed? I felt nervous but was trying to joke and laugh and act like I was perfectly comfortable. I remember feeling the need, almost crave, to fix something. I needed to walk out of the office that day a different person. Or at least, with different circumstances.

I had it all wrong. The narrative. The story I told myself. Oh, don’t get me wrong, much of it was true…but also true was that my focus was all skewed, hyper-focused on my fear, my losses, my pain. In my narrative, I left no room for God. No expectation of Him.

It’s been a few years since that eye-opening moment, and I can tell you with certainty that there is ALWAYS another story. No matter what. No matter how the darkness prevails, how lost the cause, how broken your heart, how dead your dream.

Please know this, my friend—I’m not saying that there aren’t things that are final. Sometimes, things can happen that are so devastatingly wrong that they crush your heart to dust. Even as I write this, I am walking through the hardest season in my life. It’s a very long season. And I am more than tired. But there IS another story at play here. And that story speaks hope in the darkest of times. It’s the reality of God being present with his people every single moment of every single day.

A while ago, my husband and I brought home a surprise for our children—a tiny, sweet, yellow and white fuzzball of a kitten.  He was everything you would want in a nine-week-old feline friend.  Playful and rambunctious, sweet and crazy cuddly.  He loved to be cuddled so much that he would start to purr before you even touched him.  Just the mere thought of snuggles made his little internal motor run.  It was adorable.   

We already have one cat, our thirteen-year-old mighty lioness, Sylvia.  Sylvie is a delight to our whole family.  She’s a fiercely loyal cat and has developed a daily and nightly routine with each of us.  She is the only cat we’ve ever taken on cross-country road trips with us, and she has been with our family through some of the hardest years of our lives. We adore her.  

Part of the reason we got a kitten was for Sylvia.  She has been the solo kitty in our home for the past five years after we had to say goodbye to her brother, Solomon. Just like us, she mourned the loss of him deeply. The loss of Solomon hit hard. Occasionally over the next five years, we discussed the thought of getting another kitten, but it always came down to a “the right kitten at the right time” situation.  In the spirit of total honesty, it was not only for Sylvia that we brought him home.  There was also a great deal of familial pressure – mostly from my daughter and me. 🙂

Imagine my excitement when, while sitting in the waiting room at a doctor’s appointment for my son, I overheard another mom asking if anyone wanted kittens.  Shamelessly interjecting myself into the conversation, I told her we might be interested, and a few days later my husband and I were standing on her porch, kitty kennel in the car, hoping to choose a kitten for our family.

It ended up being a sort of rescue mission as the sweet little furball we chose was very sickly. While his sisters were literally climbing up and down our bodies, this little guy was shaky and just tucked the little scrap of himself into my husband’s palms. “I think he needs us,” my husband said as he looked up at me, a soft smile on his face.

I cradled him in my arms all the way home. His eyes were goopy, his nose was crusty, and, though I didn’t see any at first, I was positive his little body was covered in fleas. (He was.) We let the kids come and see him in the garage when we got home, but I wouldn’t let them hold him until I had given him a thorough cleaning. After his bath, he curled himself up in a tiny heap on the bathroom rug and slept…for HOURS. Honestly, we weren’t sure he was going to make it. He was so weak and had not made any move to eat or drink after his bath. My husband and I sat on the floor beside him and prayed over his little body.

When he finally pulled himself from sleep, we showed him the water bowl, and immediately he started slurping the water as fast as he could. He drank as if he had survived a drought. Then, ignoring the canned food and milk we thought may be more pleasing for his kitten palette, he went right to Sylvia’s bowl of crunchy cat food and started eating it. We were ecstatic to see this sign of life. He was weak, his eyes were still watery, but he seemed a little perkier, and we grabbed hold of hope that he just might pull through. The next few days brought more and more improvement. When he was rid of the fleas, his body was able to pull in sustenance, and he started to grow. Within a week, we saw him go from a fragile, sickly runt to a playful, energetic, and persistent little furball. 

Sometimes you just have to get the bugs out. 

To our children’s dismay, we christened him “Bobby Barone” after a much-loved character on one of our favorite television shows, Everybody Loves Raymond.  It was a ridiculously huge human label for the tiniest of our household members. But my husband and I loved it. Every time we said his name it cracked us up, and the laughter felt like a gift. The weeks and months before getting Bobby Barone had held a lot of stress for our family… a lot of “hits” coming from all directions.  I hate the cliché “when it rains, it pours,” but man, was I feeling drenched.

Having Bobby in the house felt a little like having a new baby.  He was very sweet and had certainly captured our hearts…but he pretty much kept us up all night, so there was that. The first week or two after we brought him home, Bobby would crash hard in the evening and then be up most of the night, crawling all over us, meowing. and begging us to play with him. When we could handle it no more, we put him in the bathroom right off our bedroom and threw a blanket in front of the doorway.  There he could safely explore and play to his heart’s content, and the blanket helped dampen the sound so we could get some rest. 

Every morning when I walked into the bathroom, he was there to greet me, motor running, meowing his fool head off.  Picking him up I would cuddle him and kiss him and spend a few minutes playing with him until he settled and was happily playing around me, chasing a ball or weaving in and out between my feet as I walked around the room.  All was good and well—until I got into the shower. 

The second I stepped in and pulled the curtain shut, his frantic meowing started. I would peek my head out so he could see me and assure him I was still there. Then I spent the next several minutes talking to him and singing to him…whatever it took to get him to understand he was not alone. Every day it was the same thing—him meowing frantically—me trying desperately to get his attention, to get him to understand. The funny thing is that we have a walk-in shower. One small step of only a few inches and he would be right with me. 

I was thinking about this one morning during our crazy bathroom routine. Suddenly, the light came on in my heart, and I got it. Bobby was acting toward me the same way I was acting toward God. Looking past Him when He’s standing right in front of me.  He talks to me, sings to me, calls my name over and over, but my own cries drown out the sound of His voice.  There I am, begging for Him to pay attention to me, never noticing His arms holding me close. With this realization grew a tenderness for my tiny kitten. And a deep appreciation for my loving Dad. 

Me too, little Bobby Barone.  Me too.

          

“I will seek what was lost and bring back what was driven away, bind up the broken and strengthen what was sick.” 

Ezekiel 34:16a (NKJV)

I’ve spent much time reflecting on the word gesture, and this is what I discovered: A gesture is a verb.  An action meant to show an emotion, feeling, or thought toward another person or situation. In other words, a gesture is meaningful but small.  It’s not everything, but it IS something.  If attention is not paid, it could be easy to miss it.  A grand gesture, on the other hand, is intended to catch the receiver’s attention. If a gesture walks into the room and taps you on the shoulder, a grand gesture bounds into the room and yells, “Look at me!”

I think that sometimes trips us up.  We have this expectation that every experience with God should be grand.  If we don’t come away “feeling all the feels,” then we believe that either He is mad at us or He simply doesn’t care.  The latter is what I convinced myself was the case for me.  I would read the Bible and see the amazing things God did.  Water to wine! Blind eyes receiving the gift of sight!  Skin diseases gone in an instant!  Dead people raised to life!  It seemed that every gesture I read about was grand.  Things that would take your breath away. 

I went to church, and it was the same.  From the pulpit, I heard how God supernaturally provided several thousand dollars for a mission trip, how He pulled cancer from a sick body, and how He opened closed wombs.  It was beautiful and amazing and, yes, breathtaking.  I rejoiced with people, and yet there was a part of me that felt left out.  What kept me awake at night was the fear that God couldn’t see me anymore.  That in the crazy chaos of the cosmos, I just got lost.  

Those years of feeling lost were some of the worst I have ever gone through.  Looking back, I can see that loss was the song playing on repeat in my heart.  During that season, I lost a parent suddenly and unexpectedly in one of the worst ways I could imagine.  My husband, kids, and I lost our support system when we had to walk away from the church we had been part of for several years.  I had to face head-on the loss of a dream that had been tucked deep inside me for most of my life.  Friends that I held dear could not find their way to walk beside me in this season, and I felt the loss of them deeply.

Those losses were hard to be sure, but the spiritual fallout went much deeper.  I lost my center.  For the first time in years, maybe ever, I lost hope.  I lost trust.  I lost confidence and courage, and oh, did I lose peace!  I lost the perspective that God always wins and is always for me.  And there it is.  I lost the knowledge, the deep in my gut knowing, that we – God and I – were in this together.

I remember telling my daughter once that God will always be the constant in her life.  He has been, and will be, the ONLY constant.  I told her that change is a natural part of life and to do her best to embrace it.  If she cannot find it in herself to embrace it (sometimes we can’t), then to always remember that there is ONE that will never change.  There is ONE that stays constant when the world around us seems unstable.  Good advice, right?  Yes, good… until you lose your center. 

I remember the exact day I lost it.   It was a beautiful autumn New England day.  The sky was my favorite color of blue.  M&M blue, as my friend Judy would call it.  The trees adorning our yard were dressed in hues of red, orange, yellow, and deep purple.  It was warm but not hot.  Any other day, I would have been basking in the beauty of Fall.  Not today.  In my heart, it was the dead of winter.  Like Narnia’s The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, this day felt like “always winter and never Christmas.”  I remember feeling cold. So cold. Cold to the point of shivering.  Applying more and more layers of clothing did nothing.  I could not get rid of the chill.  My thoughts tumbled around and around in a jumbled mess, grasping for a safe place to land but never finding relief.  As the hours of the day dragged on, I kept having to remind myself to breathe.  Time and time again, I would feel my chest start to burn and realize that I had been holding my breath. 

The thing I remember the most, though, was that I felt so alone.  I was in my own house with my two children and my husband – the people I hold most dear in this life- and I ached with loneliness.  I knew something inside me had changed.  A truth whose script was so ancient that it must’ve been carved on the inside of me somehow had disappeared. 

Fighting panic, I remember forcing myself to act overly cheerful so that I wouldn’t fall apart in front of the kids.  You know how we parents do that?  I was immensely excited about the frozen pizzas we were having for dinner.  I laughed hard at the sitcom we watched together while eating.  I was silly and funny and did everything I could to not let on like my world was in pieces.  How could I explain that I had just lost the very center of my being?  That the very thing that had held me together all these years was now gone?

So, there I was, feeling lost, alone, and abandoned.  Let me tell you something about that combination—it’s a slippery slope to travel.  It’s toeing the edge of a precipice, grasping an armful of weights.  It’s hitting the bottom and discovering that quicksand is what cushioned your fall.  That is where the email found me that day.  At the very bottom, my heart and mind lodged deep in quicksand.  But instead of looking down and seeing sand, saltwater, and clay dragging me toward death, I saw hopelessness and despair and fear.

I was in that place for months… no, honestly, years.  I could not shake it off.  I could not get it back.  I could not make sense of what had happened.  Sometimes, I pretended that all was well between God and I… but it was my own heart I was trying to protect.  I walked through my days waiting for something to fall back into place, for the seeming wrongs to right themselves. 

The walls around my heart began to echo what I had decided was the truth.  And they were deafening.  They cried out that I had been abandoned.  That I had pushed God away.  They whispered that I would never feel Him again, that the aching, desperate, insatiable gnawing I felt in my gut was simply proof that He was No. Longer. With. Me. 

Something I think is important to stress here is that this season of loss was not “in like a lion, out like a lamb”.  Yes, some losses hit fast and hit hard and left me gaping in their wake.  But other losses came slowly, one chip to my heart at a time.  Sometimes, the loss was so faint, almost a passing whisper, just enough to leave me a bit unsettled, but something I could easily shake off or reason away.  But over time, all the whispers and all the screams grew loud enough to overpower the distractions I had put in their way.  No, it wasn’t a quick descent into the pit, just a stream of steady hits to my heart, my emotions, my relationships, my faith, my hope. 

I have learned that loss and grief are unpredictable.  You cannot reason with them, nor easily tuck them away.  They must be felt. They must be processed.  They must be given time and space.  Perhaps it was a bit of a “perfect storm” situation, where many small factors, put in line with big factors, created a storm surge that left me swirling alone in darkness.  That may be some of it, but in my heart, I know that the biggest factor is that in all those losses, I lost sight of the source of Light.  And as the waves pummeled me over and over, I stopped looking for the light.  And darkness closed in. 

The email in my inbox unsettled me. Sent from a girl who is equal parts family and friend, the letter was raw and real. Through the computer screen, it was obvious that the words poured from a desperate heart. As I settled in my chair to consume her thoughts, my mind was already racing to formulate an encouraging response…until I hit these sentences:

“They were discussing how God cares about you, every detail of you. And although in my head I know that’s probably true, something in me just doesn’t buy it. Not at all. I don’t see how God can care about every detail of every person individually.  I think He knows our names and some facts about us or the overall trajectory of our lives. But I don’t think he cares about what flavor of tea I like, or if I feel sad for a couple of minutes, or even whether I stay at my University or transfer to another. In my head, He’s like an employer or hippie Dad. And when I tried to figure out why I believe this, I traced it back to the fact that I am a feeler. And God hasn’t given me any feeling experiences in a long time… Basically, I need a specific-to-me grand gesture from God. I need to see him care for me as an individual, to make me feel special and set apart, even though He’s also caring for everyone else.”

I froze. Re-reading her words, I thought how weird it was that someone else had written the condition of my heart so specifically. Through her honesty, she unknowingly gave voice to thoughts I had been trying to ignore.

Countless times in the following weeks, I sat at my laptop, willing my fingers to respond. They would fly across the keys but inevitably hit delete every time. Once, in a bold move, I even typed the truth of my own struggle. I wrote that I was so weary, my energy so spent, my passion so gone, my heart so splintered. I deleted that, too. Seeing my faithless confession displayed was painful.

The problem was that I had experienced intimate moments with God before. Beautifully sweet, encouraging, and loving moments… but it had been a really, really long time.  I knew something was wrong – was off, but I didn’t know what, nor what to do about it.  I was living like it was copacetic, but my heart ached from the lack.

As the days turned to weeks and the weeks to months, the email continued to haunt me.  But I couldn’t do it. I could not put in writing what my heart was no longer sure was true.

Eventually, I stopped trying to respond.