Nicole K. Twedt

Being Brave When Life Is Hard

Scars

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Mid-February, 2017

I’m struggling lately over brokenness, my brokenness, and the scars of my past.  I’m wrestling with the wounds of grief, loss of many kinds, and basically I’m feeling like I’ve been kicked around, tossed aside and thrown in a ditch at the side of the road, an attempted homicide of the heart gone terribly wrong.

I don’t believe in coincidence.  I believe in God’s mighty love, quick to save at just the right moment.  Basically, at the very moment I was falling apart he gave me the charge to write.  And confirmed it in a mighty way through Courtney who didn’t have a clue what was going on, or what my struggles were.  So for the last week of writing I can honestly say that I’m no longer falling apart.  I shouldn’t be surprised.  It’s always when I begin to listen to what God is saying to my heart, that my soul quiets down and rests.   I just had to get over myself and write to get there.

Just like that, writing has lifted my overwhelmed soul and brought life to these tired bones.  Most of these blog posts will never see the light of day, and that’s okay.  I have to process all these feelings somewhere.

There’s something else.  About a year ago I started a Bible Study with a group of friends.  Due to the craziness of life, family schedules and other commitments, we never were able to get past a week or so of study.  It’s an old Beth Moore study, Beloved Disciple.

I have run from writing, but I have been running from him as well.  I felt God calling my heart back to Bible Study.  It’s strange, and funny, and so like God that in week 3, where we left off, is all about grief, how the disciples, particularly John, would have felt during the time between the capture of Jesus in the garden, his crucifixion and his appearance to Mary Magdalene and the disciples.  I didn’t see that one coming.  How perfect that a study I started a year ago, from a study that was published in 2002, is exactly what I needed today.  I marvel at his tenderness and perfect way of coming to me at just the right moment.  Hope wasn’t lost after all.  Oh, I was holding on to hope for sure, always a flicker of hope, but the flicker was loosing some of its wonder trapped under the weight of my brokenness.

Beth reminds us of the story of how Jesus came to his dear ones, the disciples, and showed them his scars.  And it hit me, I’m struggling with brokenness, with my scars.  What a comforting reminder, to know Jesus still has scars.  He conquered the grave but he was scarred nonetheless, like me.  And those precious scars remind us of his great love and resurrection power.

I feel comforted at last and so, well normal!  Grieving is a part of life, a normal part of life, even if hurts.

I read recently in a Facebook article (because I am very scientific in my research), that scar tissue is stronger than regular skin.  I don’t know if this is true.  And I’m too tired to Google it.  But I will hold to the belief that God is going to use this messy part of life for his glory.  That the gruesome details of my story will be what draws me closer to him as I write, and what keeps drawing me near so that I can cheer others as they run the into his arms.

A Time to Mourn

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Someone I know lost a parent over the weekend.  Her father’s death was unexpected.  I can’t say I’m super close to this person, but my heart aches for her and her sweet family.   The Bible teaches that in Jesus’s resurrection, death has lost its sting.  Yet as I write, someone I care about is experiencing loss like nothing she has ever known.

This can’t be happening.

I don’t know what it’s like to lose a parent unexpectedly.  But I know grief, I know it well.  I find it next to impossible to untangle what I’ve tasted and seen from what she’s experiencing today.  After all, I’m an INFJ in the realm of Meyer-Briggs, heavy on the F which stands for feeling.  I’m starting to think I lack the skills needed to set my feelings aside, at least for a while.  I can’t seem to remove myself from the situation and focus on something other than grief, hers or mine.

Knowing that another family is experiencing grief is like an emotional tidal wave, as suffocating today as it was twenty-something years ago.  I’m drowning in it as I fold clothes, unload the dishwasher and prepare an afternoon snack for the Tiniest Tiny.

I can’t stop thinking about dad.

Dad suffered six years.  When his life came to an end we knew it was happening.  There were no surprises.  We had more than enough time to say good-by, everyone did.  Sanguine to the end, his life wasn’t over until practically every one of his neighbors, friends and family members stopped by for one last visit.

The song If You Could See Me Now, not Eminem’s version or the 1980s cruise jingle, but the one by Truth, was playing on the CD player in the living room when he died.  It was rather loud because these hard-of-hearing ears of mine needed help unraveling the lyrics from instrumentals.  It was the middle of the night.

The song speaks of walking the streets of gold, of no longer being broken, of no more pain.  It is a song about releasing a loved one from a place of suffering to come face-to-face with Jesus, strong and whole.  I was seated next to dad, but almost missed that splendid moment when he took his last breath and slipped from his cancerous shell of a body into Jesus’ arms, victorious and cancer-free at last.

I’m thankful dad is with Jesus, I really am.  But I’d be lying if I told you I didn’t want him back for a little while.

Dad knew I loved children and wanted to be a teacher.  I would’ve given anything for him to see me graduate from college and set up my first kindergarten classroom.  I wish he’d been the one to walk me to meet Greg at the end of the aisle on our wedding day, though I will always cherish the moment I spent with Dave.  He was dad’s best friend.

And our three babies, his grand-babies.  It kills me that our kids will never meet their Grandpa Steve.  They will never hear his hearty laughter or sit through one of the many tall-tales from his childhood on the farm near Mt. Spokane.  On this side of heaven, our son Steven will never know the one he was named for.

One Father’s Day, when Greg and I were newly dating, our pastor preached a moving sermon.  He charged the fathers of our congregation to rise up, to be strong in the Lord and lead their families well.  That’s the kind of dad I had.  He loved the Lord with all of his heart and all of  his soul, and oh, how he loved his family.

I’m a private person by nature.  But even I could not contain the desire after church to ask Greg, my then boyfriend, to take me to the cemetery.  Greg was as distant as any one of his Norwegian ancestors would have been.  He kept his Oakley shades on and stood aside while I had myself a little moment.  I’m not used to breaking down in front of others.  The vulnerability of that afternoon was as new to me as our relationship.

Even though I shouldn’t have, I remember turning to Greg afterward and apologizing for the awkwardness of my crying fit, the grief that came out of nowhere.

“Yeah, that was awkward,” was Greg’s response.  The cruelty of his statement was out of character with the man I knew so swell, or as well as I could after only a few months dating.

He then removed his sunglasses and revealed a face streaked with tears, tears for a man he’d never met and for a woman who really missed her dad.  I knew for sure that afternoon that Greg loved me, and in his arms I could grieve.

I started a blog last June.  I love to write.  It’s the most tangible way I know to praise God and better understand my world.   In my mind’s eye, I saw my blog as a place to write about life and to bring the hope of Jesus to others.  An encourager by nature, it’s what I do best.  I didn’t really want a mommy blog, but I knew I was going to sprinkle a few kid stories into my writing from time to time to keep things light and entertaining.

The thing is, I’ve been running from writing lately.  I’ve been running because he (and by he I mean God) is prompting me to explore grief and write about the hard things in life.  It’s not a fun subject to tackle.  But I have to say, this little corner of the internet is serving its purpose.  I’m learning to be brave in this place.  I’m learning to air out some of the grief I’ve kept hidden all these years, grief I didn’t realize I had in me because everything was fine except it wasn’t.

I’m starting to think maybe, just maybe, I’m honoring God and giving him glory as I learn to take his hand and let him unpack the beautiful mess that’s called mothering in the midst of grief.

Christmas 2016

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Originally from December 2016

It’s Wednesday morning in the second week of advent.  I’m meal planning for the remainder of the week, well at least that’s the goal.  I tap, tap, tap my fingertips to the iTunes app and select the perfect Christmas album to be serenaded by as I figure out what on earth to make for dinner.  It’s new to me, this album, and I have twenty minutes to listen to it and make a list before it’s time to set off for Fred Meyer and Central Market.

An hour later, here I am, basically ugly crying in the middle of my kitchen.  Alice Currah’s Savory Sweet Life cookbook is open but ignored on the cluttered counter top.   I have always been slightly melancholic and land on the introspective side of things but I wasn’t expecting this.  I am positively wrecked by the album’s stirring instrumentals and its lyrics of great hope.  For they tell the tale of beauty born of pain and suffering in a time when nothing made sense.  The album is on repeat and I’m keenly aware that Jesus’s birth story is warming in my heart the desire to write once again.  But to write is to create, and in order to create there has to be an emptying of sorts.  The process is raw and overwhelming yet holy.

It’s been a year of hurts, some big, some small.  It’s been a year of newness too.  A new beginning came in the form of full-day kindergarten for Lauren.  Steven migrated to second grade and overnight it seems that Emily has morphed into a strong and splendid beauty of a fourth-grader.  Then there’s church.  We left a church we loved as our family’s faith journey took a different direction and we said hello to something new, a church less than 3 miles from home.  Each time we’ve had to leave behind what was glorious and good before we could move forward to the next adventure, which has also been glorious and good.  It’s been exciting and scary and every single feeling along the way.

We encountered grief this year as a family.  My grandmother died in January.  She was my mom’s mother, and her death is complicated for me.  We bid farewell to the older gentleman who lived in the white house three doors from us.  We didn’t know him very well but his life mattered and we miss his presence in our neighborhood.

It’s been a year of setbacks and a year of great rejoicing.  I hardly know where to start.  Steven lost vision over the summer, you see.  It was truly alarming.  Our little boy had to do an extremely hard thing for a little boy to do.  He wore an eyepatch for six hours a day over his strong eye, mostly during elementary school hours.  It was a small setback, compared to how far he has come vision-wise.  And his suffering pales in comparison to the story of a young lady at our school who will go blind after complications from a kidney transplant.   But heartache is heartache.  Patching for six hours is quite the ordeal for a little kid acutely aware that he is different from his peers, though we promise he’s loved all the same.  I gathered Steven in my arms several times during the summer and into fall, all seven plus years of him.  Over and over and over again, I declared one of God’s promises.  The promise that Steven is deeply loved and not alone when he does the hard work of patching.  And then, about a month ago we learned that Steven’s hard work paid off.  He has regained sight, thank God, and patching was reduced to three hours a day outside of school.  We breathed a sigh of relief and offered up trembling hands in praise and thanksgiving.

As for Lauren, I think we’re a little shell-shocked from her story.   It knocks the wind out of me, even now.  I wrote last year about waiting for February for the follow-up with the pediatric ENT and audiologist to learn more about her hearing loss.  How we prayed in the months between visits, many of you prayed, too.  I could almost taste the good news that we hoped to get at the upcoming visit to Children’s Hospital.  After all, a few years ago Lauren had lost hearing in her other ear and it was fully restored.  And we knew from Lauren’s pediatrician that her eardrum had been spared.

Lauren’s story, however, ended up being a story with a twist.  We didn’t get the answer we wanted when we wanted it.  Something was wrong with the Tiniest Tiny.  Lauren had lost more of her hearing.  In the darkness of night we had to abandon our victory dance and learn instead to simply cling to God.  We had to learn to let him hold us as he whispered that he is good, always good, that he’s never going to let us down, the whole time feeling that he is.  And then we did receive the news we dared to hope for.  At another follow-up at Children’s, a specialist assured us that Lauren’s ear could indeed repair itself over time, as ears sometimes do after trauma.  When summer came to an end, the same specialist broke the news that hearing in Lauren’s left ear, the one that was lost and lost again, was practically normal, with the potential for more healing to come.

I could have saved time and just skipped to the good news about Steven and Lauren.  Or I could have ignored it all together and just wrote the typical family Christmas letter.  It’s what normal people do and would have been kinder to my sensitive heart.  I most definitely should have included more details about Em.  She’s an absolute doll, and she’s thriving by the way.  But it’s kind of hard to truly rejoice with us unless you know where we’ve come from, what we’ve been through.  Because for us, and many of you, it’s been a year of camping out in the middle of the story, with all the uncertainty that comes when victory is out of sight and the days are long and hard.

 

Yet hope and uncertainty go hand-in-hand, with hope winning out every time.  I desperately want to shout this message to the world, or at least write about it more.  I’m sensing in my bones and in the deepest part of my soul that now is the time to write.

Today marks the third Sunday of Advent and the Tiniest Tiny is on the verge of losing her first tooth.  I’m feeling all the feels.  Before long, a dairy-free version of Alice’s Spicy Sausage Kale Bean Soup is reheated on the stove top burner.  Leftover Thai food is thrown into the microwave and two-thirds of our children refuse to eat it.  Our family of five gathers around the oak dining room table to light the Joy candle.  As the flame of the little pink candle flickers and comes to life, we set our eyes on whatever is lovely and good, to the dawn of about to get better.  This is the song of old, the story rising in me.

Greg, Nicole, Emily, Steven, Lauren and our little dog, Chloe