Is It Just Me

I find myself saying, more often than not, like Goldie Hawn in the movie Private Benjamin, “I want to wear sandals. I want to go out to lunch. I want to be normal again.” But whittle it down to brass tacks, to the barebones; what I’m crying out is “I just want a normal life.”

Christmas, for us, was grabbed moments. Between flying to Florida on December 12th, to then drive to Alabama and help unpack my due-any-day pregnant daughter and her husband, to staying with her in case she went into labor while her husband started a new job, my travels seemed to come to a close when I arrived home on the afternoon of Christmas Eve. As with the settling of flurried feathers after a pillow fight, I thought, as I took a deep breath, my car finally rolling to a stop in front of our home, that the next few days might be relaxing.

That night we celebrated Christmas with my oldest son and his family on Christmas Eve. The next morning, my husband, Jerry and I had a quiet hour or two enjoying Christmas with my youngest son. We then drove to Alabama with Christmas dinner in tow, to be with Laura and Andy on Christmas night. Going back home that same day, we found ourselves dreaming aloud, not of sugarplums, but of a day of naps and movies…. Not to be, the next morning we got the joyous call that Laura was in labor and so we gladly drove back to greet our new granddaughter, Lucy Drew, who was born five hours later.

Then the vortex truly began especially for Laura and Andy who had just gone through one of the fastest relocations I had ever witnessed, as three days later, sweet and precious Lucy was admitted back to the hospital for a stay of ten days. Watching and feeling helpless, except for prayer, we have tried in feeble ways to love and support Laura, Andy, and Lucy any way that we could.

Yesterday, I was talking with Laura, who wrote in an earlier guest blog, (“A Smooth Sea Never Made A Skilled Sailor” at dashofstrange.com), that she and her husband, Andy, never wanted a nine-to-five normal life. With what is happening now with her precious newborn, my daughter has recanted that thought, that lifestyle, declaring as with Goldie Hawn, as with me, “I want a normal life.”

But we are not alone. We know that. Our story, Laura and Andy’s story is one of many. So many are facing life that is spinning so violently that it feels as if their world will come off its axis. I could go down the list, but you already know it all too well. Suffice it to say; we feel like our normal lives have fallen off the cliff, are already in free-fall, and we collectively want to yell, “Stop!”

Many believe that the book of Job is about his patience. But I feel, in addition to his hurting and suffering and asking “why,” he might have been thinking, “I want to go back to the way it was, to the days where I had my wealth, my health, my cattle, my chickens, my home, my children…my normal life—the way it was, the way it used to be.

But he did not and where he landed, what Job did come to, was to begin to understand that God is God and that he is not. And where I am landing is, that I am not.

God’s ways are not our ways and His thoughts are not our thoughts. (Isaiah 55:8) But I know that as a parent loves their child in so many flawed ways, God loves us in perfection—even when we don’t understand the swirl, the upheaval, the pain, and the veritable vortex.

God is God and I am not. Right now, I don’t understand. Right now, with my daughter and her husband, with my family, we are looking up through a veil of weariness and exhaustion. But we do know this, one day we will see clearly and we will see how perfectly God loved us through all of this.

Kimberly