Nicole K. Twedt

Being Brave When Life Is Hard

Christmas 2015

by //

 

Originally from December, 2015

It’s been a Year

I wasn’t going to write a Christmas letter this year.  I love doing it, but we’re in a busy season.  Also, it’s been a hard year.  I’m not sure how to include all that’s transpired over the last 12 months or how to write it well.  A bird’s eye view of 2015 would show deep heartbreak, but also such love and tenderness; a year rich in mercies and paramount change and healing in my heart.  I won’t bore you with all of the details because most are too tender to share and to be honest, I’m still processing.

The Husband and Me

Greg and I celebrated 10 years of marriage on January 7th.  By the time you read this we will have been married almost 11 years.  11 is nothing compared to 50 years, even 20 or 15, but for us 11 years is big and so we celebrate. It’s fun looking back at how stupid we were a decade ago.  Who fights over the correct way to enter and exit a shower, which grocery store is worthy of our patronage or how to chop a green onion?   (We did.)  We hardly have things figured out but we blindly stumbled upon a small part of the secret to a healthy and happy marriage, at least for us.  Just this November we learned that Greg is more than willing to accompany me to a show, and by show I mean theatre, and by theatre, I mean musical theatre, if only I would go to the local steakhouse with my date.  And they lived happily ever after.

The Twedtlings

The biggest little one is already a third-grader.  She’s a smarty, that one.  Emily continues with violin lessons and is super excited to be the Jingle Bells bell ringer in the 2nd/3rd grade winter concert next week.  Our girl is a Brownie this year.  If you are in need of a Thin Mint or Samoa fix during cookie season, you know who to call.  Really, please call Emily!  We can’t imagine she’ll sell too many Girl Scout Cookies in our mostly Gluten-Free / Dairy-Free / Paleo-Wannabe family.  Still, Emily is as determined as she’s always been.  Mamas and daddies with toddlers and babies, hang on!  It keeps getting better.  9-year-olds are worth the wait.  We promise!

As for the first-grader, it turns out that Steven-in-the-middle is an awesome soccer player.  We’re not sure if it’s good or bad, but our boy was christened The Beast by his assistant coach.  The Beast has a gift.  The Beast doesn’t get his soccer moves from his parents.  It’s trilling, watching Steven play.  I cried a bit during soccer season at how little his vision impairment affects his life (like not at all).  I never thought I’d thank God for sports, but I did. Every single game.  We’re still praying for healing for his eyes but until then, God has shown over and over that he goes before and after Steven in all his crazy kid endeavors.

Steven is not the only beast on the block.  After all, Lauren is a Twedtling and Twedtling preschoolers are not easy.  What 4-year-old is?  We never met a little one with such bold opinions about clothing, especially in regard to fancy party dresses and accessories.  Lucky for us, the Tiniest Tiny channels her dark side to a worthy cause.  She is whipping our dog Chloe into shape, getting her to mind better with the passing of each day.  With her hands on her hips, she demands, and not very nicely, “Chloe!  Go to your house!” And Chloe, tail down, does exactly what she’s told and heads straight for the plastic dog crate. I exaggerate only slightly because the beast in Lauren only comes out about 10% of the time, which is not bad.  Lauren really is a tender little girl, full of sweetness.  Life is a song and dance in her world.  She adores ballet with Miss Debbie and especially delights in “performing” with her plastic microphone at the old piano.

Being Brave

One aforementioned heartache worth sharing has to do with hearing.  It always does.  I took Lauren in for her annual hearing check in October.  On the way to Children’s Bellevue my phone was stuck on You Make Me Brave by Amanda Cook and Bethel Music, which is my current favorite since Courtney sang it last spring.  I didn’t realize I had it on repeat.  I guess the technical term is loop.  I didn’t even know my phone looped or that it could get stuck on loop or that I had a loop icon to begin with.  Come to think of it, it might not be called looping.  Maybe I made it up.  All I know is that I just completed an iOS update and everything was wonky with iTunes.  You Make Me Brave filled our van over and over, at least 7-10 times on our way to Bellevue because Lauren and I took the backroads to avoid 405 tolls.  As your love/ In wave after wave/ Crashes over me, Crashes over me/ For you are for us/ You are not against us/ Champion of Heaven/ You made a way for all to enter in.

I’m pretty sure God wanted me to know that his love for Lauren crashes over her in wave after wave.  He is for her, not against her.  You see, the Tiniest Tiny has lost hearing again, this time in her left ear.  This is not the same ear that hearing was lost and restored when she was little.  Her loss is conductive (mine is neurosensory) and is borderline normal.  Although she isn’t technically hard-of-hearing at this point, Lauren’s hearing is not what it once was in that ear.  We made an appointment for another hearing evaluation in 3 months.  Until then I was told to have her pediatrician clean out her waxy ear because one of the tubes is out but stuck in ear wax.  The audiologist is certain that a damaged eardrum will be revealed under all of the lovely wax.   Can I just say that my heart broke that morning?

I remember looking at my phone when we left Children’s. The loop icon, if it’s even called that, was not showing.  Yet the whole way back You Make Me Brave repeated over and over.  You make me brave/ You make me brave/ No fear can hinder now the promises you made.  It makes absolutely no sense.  It really doesn’t.  It’s really hard to be brave when there is something wrong with your child.  Despite all that, maybe even because of it, I think being brave means having the courage to believe that God is who he says he is and trust that he will do what he says he will do. And if we’re not sure how to pray and what these promises are, we should ask him.  The Bible is pretty clear about them.  I’m sensing in the deepest places of my heart that it is not the time for wishy-washy “heal her if it’s your will”  prayers.  It’s time to call on God to do what he promised even when it doesn’t make sense.  He healed her once before.  Why not again? It’s time to be brave.

Holding onto Hope

When I look back over these 12 months, and back further over the last two-and-a-half years, I have to remember the promise he gave me about Lauren during her first hearing crisis before he healed her.  In my deep place of hurt I wasn’t sure he was for us, but he led me to discover these words about himself, “He will cover you with his feathers.  He will shelter you with his wings.  His faithful promises are your armor and protection (Psalm 91:4).”  It didn’t make sense at the time, and it doesn’t always make sense now but I know him, I know him well.  This potential hearing disorder, it is not from him.

I risk ending this note with a faith story equivalent to a cheesy After School Special.  Yet I kind of have to.  I have to end in hope because what else is there?  It’s December and we are hopeful.  I took Lauren to the pediatrician to have her ears cleaned, to see if the tube could be removed.  Under all that wax was a perfect ear drum.  Perfect.  The pediatrician strongly believes that a combination of one very waxy ear and a tube stuck in wax resulted in a less than normal hearing test.  She believes that February’s evaluation will reveal perfect hearing once again.  It scares me to write this.  Not that I don’t believe Lauren’s hearing has been spared once again.  I don’t doubt it for a minute.  I’m a little worried that I will write about her healing and then it won’t happen and people will think I’m a nutcase.  More so, I’m deeply worried that someone will read this and think God loves Lauren or us more than he loves them.  Nothing is further from the truth.

I do know that God is for us.  God is for you.  Wether you are a carnivore, a dreamer, a Girl Scout, a soccer star or a ballerina and everyone, absolutely everyone in between, God is for you.  He is not against you.   He is for you, even if you have yet to see his promises fulfilled.  Hold on to his promises.  Let his waves of love wash over you as you hold on to them.  Merry Christmas.

Love,

Greg, Nicole, Emily, Steven and Lauren Twedt

The Beginning

by //

Originally from June 2016

To make a long story fit into a tidy post, I’ll say that in the beginning I was a teacher.  To be precise (because I always like to be precise), I was a kindergarten and Pre-K teacher.  I loved being a teacher.  Teaching was life to my soul, it’s what I was created to do.

I’m a mama now.  I have three children, Emily, Steven and Lauren.   My husband is Greg.  I always wondered if I would return to teaching when our youngest went off to kindergarten.

After all, I worked my tail off to be a teacher.  I had a lot, and I mean a lot, of trouble getting into Woodring College of Education at WWU.   Due to a lethal combination of anxiety and test taking, I simply could not pass the teacher’s college entrance exam.

There’s always another way in.  I learned from a Woodring department advisor that if I changed my major from Elementary Education with an emphasis on English to just plain ol’ English, then I could reapply without taking the entrance exam after I earned my bachelor’s degree.

 

Something strange happened in the English Department.  I’d always been a voracious reader, and I’d always kept a journal.  But the writing aspect of being an English major both struck me and stuck with me.  Beyond analyzing plot structure and character development, I soon learned that writing is how I make sense of God, myself, people and the world around me.

Lauren, our youngest, is going into kindergarten in just a few short months.  I heard about a few teaching opportunities, one possible lead and a few actual job offers.  I still love teaching.  Why couldn’t I get excited about these teaching positions?

What I’m about to say will sound like I’m switching subjects.  Or I will come across as a crazy person.  Either way, I should mention that around the start of Lauren’s final year of preschool, God told me that it was time to call Mr. Turner and arrange for him to tune the old Betsy Ross Spinnet.  This tug on my heart to tune the piano went on for months.  But I didn’t do anything about it because it was so weird.   I didn’t think it could really be from the Lord.  I mean, come on, tune the piano? Why would God care about my old piano?  Yet I couldn’t shake the sense that I really was supposed to call Mr. Turner.  So I did.

Shortly after Mr. Turner tuned the piano, and I started playing again, the Lord spoke.

Sing a New Song.

What the heck?  I don’t sing.

Fast forward to a winter retreat in Seabrook with dear friends.   God took this tug on my heart, the one to Sing a New Song, and made it abundantly clear.

I never thought that Sing a New Song was supposed to mean whatever it meant in the Bible.

Except I was wrong.

Sing a new song to the LORD!  Let the whole earth sing to the LORD!  Sing to the LORD; praise his name.  Each day proclaim the good news that he saves.  Publish his glorious deeds among the nations.  Tell everyone about the amazing things he does (Psalm 96:1-3 NLT).

In other words, the time has come for me to bid farewell to teaching, at least for now.  It’s time for me to dream a new dream.

Now is the time to write.

N.

Christmas 2016

by //

 

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