Nicole K. Twedt

Being Brave When Life Is Hard

Archives for February 2017

Thirty-eight Minus Twenty

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Originally from early February, 2017

I originally and inappropriately came up with the title Crazy Town for this blog post.  After all, the shoe fits.  A little too well.  I thought about Twenty Years or maybe even Battle Wounds.  But I’m partial to Thirty-eight Minus Twenty.

With a smile on my face I admit it’s true, the part about life being a crazy town.  My sanity is in question most days.  I have three children and a small dog, after all.  It’s crazy town all the time.  But this is different.  I’ve been wondering why I’ve been highly-emotional this year.  Highly-emotional, even for me.  I tend to fly on the side of highly sensitive by nature.  It just seems that I’m a little too quick to get teary about everything just about all the time these days, which is unlike me.  I may be highly in-tune with my feelings, but I prefer not to let anyone know what’s going on.  No one is going to see me lose it.  I’ll do my falling apart in private thank you very much.  I’m Scandinavian, after all.

I’ve been sick lately, really sick.  I’ve had a sinus infection since forever.  One of the perks (if you can call it a perk) during the initial fever-laden days was that I was too sick even to read, which forced me to sit on the couch and do nothing but watch TV and think.  Everything else hurt.  No complaints here.  When mama is sick and the kids are old enough to somewhat fend for themselves, being sick and homebound is honestly a little like a mini-vacation minus the spa.  Just me and the couch and season one of Bones.  Quality Netflix, I tell yah.  I’m living the life.

Someone like me needs time to process just about everything, and with three busy kids I don’t have the luxury to sit and think about much of anything.  But it hit me, this last week on the couch with season one of Bones in the background.  I know what’s up.

I turned Thirty-eight in June.  I love being thirty-eight.  The year began triumphantly.  For it was on my birthday that I pretended to be brave and bought myself this domain and purchased all that needed purchasing to get this blog dream into my actual life (even thought this baby isn’t launched).  Thirty-eight-year-old me took a very important first step.

But thirty-eight minus twenty equals eighteen.

I don’t know why I was doing the math.  I’m a word girl, after all.  Though lately I’m contorting into some sort of hybrid number girl.  If only I can view a number by its name rather than numeric form (like five instead of 5), which has nothing to do with anything.

Back to thirty-eight minus twenty equals eighteen.

I randomly came across a picture of a guy I went to high school with on Instagram.  I was thinking it’s been twenty years since I’ve seen him, which put me just shy of eighteen.  Suddenly all that happened right before I turned eighteen came rushing back.  I believe the kindness of the Holy Spirit led me to the make the connection:  It’s been twenty years, closer to twenty-one now, since I was almost eighteen and lost my sweet dad to cancer.  This is a fraction of what I don’t want to write about.

I can hardly breathe, but it’s not the sinus infection.  I’m reliving the horror that was 1996, but in many ways I’m experiencing my emotions for the first time.   During the real-time first time I wasn’t ready to face the darkness.  I focused on God’s grace in the situation, but didn’t allow myself to experience the full range of emotion that trauma calls for.  In other words, I set my feet firmly in the land of denial.  I remember how my throat used to hurt, burning as I held in the screams.  I couldn’t face them,  couldn’t let them out, couldn’t bear to hear them.  I wasn’t ready.  So I watched many a sad movie so I could cry for the men and women on the big screen.  What was I thinking?  Why couldn’t I cry for me?

For all the times I said everything was okay, it wasn’t.  How could it be okay?

And it’s more than my dad’s actual death, the most horrific, yet gentle at the same time, beautiful moment of my life.  It’s his illness and the overlapping time when I lost my hearing that haunts me so.

Almost two years ago God set me on an adventure.  Not an exciting adventure.  It was quite the gruesome one.  Through a writing assignment at a Story Retreat near Leavenworth, God set my feet back through time to show me that he was always there, during the darkest moments of my life, of cancer and the trauma of loosing my hearing on the cusp of high school.

God was tender, so tender to me during the writing activity.  I had always known that God was with me in dad’s actual death because I was getting to know him then.  But God spoke to my heart about how he was there in the darkness before I knew him.  And he spoke to me about how these experiences, these hurts, didn’t come from him, but he’ll use them for good, and I believed him.

Then last fall, maybe the end of summer, our church did a Sermon Series titled Do Hard Things.  I remember very little of what was said, but I can’t stop thinking about how it occurred to me during one of the sermons that it’s hard for me to ask for help.  Again this winter we are revisiting the Do Hard Things series.  I guess I’m not the only one who needs a repeat.  Anyway, I remember clearly in January one of the pastors saying that Doing Hard Things means it’s time for some of us to deal with our stuff (raises hand).

And that has to be why I’m running from writing.  You see, I started the blog in June but have written precious little since.  I don’t want to deal with my stuff.  To write is to process and make sense of my God, myself, my world.  But to write is to hurt because writing involves facing what I’m feeling, what I’ve been feeling and what I haven’t let myself feel for over twenty years.

Today was a much-needed snow day for our school district and neighboring towns.  The kids played for quite a bit in the back yard dusted in white. The kids had fun and the dog came back with her beautiful long hair dreadlocked in snow balls.  Don’t ask.

After showers to warm their bodies and lunch to warm their bellies, even if it was only organic instant oatmeal, we watched the rest of Pete’s Dragon, the newer version.

Grace (Bryce Dallas Howard) is the park ranger.  She rescued young Pete from the great Forrest of the North where he has lived for the last six years, alone she thinks.  Pete is an orphan.  His parents died tragically in a car accident on an adventure six years ago.  Grace tells Pete that he is a brave, brave boy and I felt the Lord whisper to my younger self and my heart, You were so, so brave.  You were a brave, brave girl.  You were so brave when your dad was sick and when you lost your hearing.

As the movie comes to an end, Elliot the Dragon brings Pete back to Grace, her boyfriend Jack, and Jack’s daughter Natalie.  Even a dragon knows it isn’t good for a boy to be without a human family.  As I watched Pete being welcomed into his new family, I could practically hear the Holy Spirit whisper once again to my heart.  It’s not good for you to be alone with all of your thoughts and experiences.  It’s time to process what you went through.  You are going to make yourself sick if you keep holding onto that time.  You were brave but I never wanted you to face it alone.  You can’t hold onto it any longer.  It’s time to deal with your stuff.  It’s time to write.  

I don’t know what this means for the blog.  But I finally know what I’m supposed to write about: grief.  And it’s the last thing I want to do.

I don’t want this blog to become a pity-party for one.  I want to write to encourage others, not to drown in a sea of narcissism.  It’s going to be hard, this writing.  But it’s impossible for me to move forward unless I deal with what’s behind.  Now is the time to release some of these toxic feelings, the ones I’ve held in for the last twenty-odd years.  Now is the time to let the bottle containing my deepest emotions explode, just a little, so it can be mended and filled again with beauty, truth, wonder and love.  Once again, it’s time to write.  Before I have it figured out.

Thirty-eight minus twenty.

Working With Clay

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Originally from January, 2017

I just spent an hour working on a post and now it’s gone. Darn WordPress. I wrote about working with clay at the Seabrook retreat.  I wrote about Martha Halvorsen and her bird’s nest made of play dough, circa 1980-something at the old Presbyterian church of my childhood.   I wrote about the Audition Song from La La Land, of being a dreamer and how dreamers need to be somewhat messy, or at least not afraid of making a mess.

I wrote of rolling clay in my hand to form a ball and of pressing the ball flat like dough into my own bird’s nest — that’s what my hands do with clay. Except in Mrs. Carson’s third grade classroom where my fingers formed the grey-greenish-blue clay into faux sticky tack for a pretend classroom.

I wasn’t finished.  I smashed the bird and the nest and started again, forming something new but I didn’t know what.  Seconds remained of the exercise.  What was I to do?  I always have a plan, even for clay.  But the nest wouldn’t do.  I needed a new dream to dream and to form a new bridge to walk across, unfamiliar yet familiar all the same.  My fingers created a place to land, a place to launch.  In the final seconds, clay that was once a bird and its nest became a book and the book means to write.   A book, memorialized in clay and by fire, or at least by oven heat.

The process of forming clay, and not knowing what the clay was supposed to resemble, taught me just as much as the final product.  The end game was prophetic but the process itself says more: It says to roll up my sleeves, get my hands dirty and not worry about what my writing is going to be.  God will tell where I’m headed as words take form.  But I needn’t worry now, my job is to write.

Changes

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Originally from August, 2016

Around two years ago, God spoke to my heart that he was doing something new in our community.  Something new was coming.   And this something new was happening or about to happen in a radius around our house. I could see it.  Slightly north of our house, down past Willis Tucker to the East, to Fred Meyer in the West and into Mill Creek.  I kept thinking this radius should end on 35th because 35th was significant, though I couldn’t have told you why.  But every time I prayed about this “new thing,” it was clear that the radius extended into Mill Creek.

At the same time, I began to grow restless with church. Not in the church itself, but out of my heart’s desire for my kids to worship with kids they see at school Monday through Friday. I started looking ahead to their teenage years with dread. Knowing myself well enough, I already despised driving the 30 plus minute commute back and forth to church so the kids could attend youth groups and small groups.

I want to invite friends to church with us.  But so far no one is willing to make the drive, once they find out where it’s located.  But we love our church.  It’s where we met and married, where we raised our babies.  Our hearts were challenged, set free and given hope at this church.  We love and will always love our church.

This summer Greg and I started two-timing on our church.  Twice a month we attended a new church, a local church.  Our kids have friends from school in their new Sunday school classes, my cousin’s kids too.  Every other Sunday we made the drive across town to our old church, where we continued to teach Sunday school during second service.

At the end of August, on Greg’s birthday actually, we decided to go to the new church for first service and our old for second. I’m glad we doubled up that Sunday because it resulted in a Come to Jesus Moment, at least for me.   I basically ugly cried all the way down I-5 because the message at the new church was the vision God gave them about building a new building to reach the demographic circle of unchurched people in the areas slightly north of our house, down past Willis Tucker to the East, to Fred Meyer in the West and into the city of Mill Creek.  What about 35th?  Well, the church property happens to be located on 35th.

Who am I that God would prepare my heart in advance and include me in this glorious new thing to come?

We have no idea what roles we are supposed to play in this new thing.  God will speak when we need to know it. All I know is that we have a tremendous love for our neighborhood and surrounding community. I know God is doing a new thing here and we are supposed to be part of it.

I don’t want to overly spiritualize this journey but I believe with all of my heart that God has gone before us to call us to something new, something we might not have been on board with had he not gone ahead to prepare the way.

This new adventure is hardly confidential.  Yet we spoke very little of this part of our story aloud, even to those who are closest to us.  We didn’t want to say anything until we were certain.

I’m sensing in my bones and in the deepest parts of my soul that now is the time.  We are entering a new season, a beautiful, splendid and scary-because-it’s new, season.  The Spirit is leading.  Our hearts are stirred.  Now is the time to go.