Inexpressible Comfort

 I've learned a lot this past week while adjusting from one side of the bed...to the cooler side and then back again.  It seems to be how the days progress.  I have had time to consider how my life has to change.  I have spent countless hours going around and around trying to figure things out and it's made for a frustrating and overwhelming week.  

Normally, I excel at bull dozing my way through.  Whenever I face a challenge, I don't stop and whimper and worry over it, I just pivot and do something else in hopes the emotion of it all will be stuffed down, to dissipate among all the other passed hurts and adversity and it would be as if it never happened and off we go on our merry way and no one, including ourselves, is the wiser. 

One thing I know for sure, you don't always feel the weight of something as it's pushing down upon you or the strain in your back from trying to carry it well with some decorum of grace. 

This week, I had no choice but to stop.  To just stop and put it down.  God works in mysterious ways and it took something as rough as Shingles to make me stop and set my life down.  That has been one of the hardest things for me to do. 

I'm fine.  I'm the one who is always fine. Most of the time, I truly am fine. The more we went through, the harder things became, the harder it was to explain to those who wanted to know/ help, the complexity of it all, and rather than summon up the emotional, and physical strength to handle the opinions and well meant comments, but hurtful nonetheless, of acquaintances, I just withdrew and retreated.  I tried so hard, every which way but our situation in life is not one that is easily explained or understood. I hold the trials of raising my chronically ill children sacred.  It has by far been the sanctifying project I have been blessed with. Still, it's hard.  That's fair.  I fault no one.  All you can do is play the cards you were dealt and hope you at least don't fold. 

I've drifted farther and farther from the world and into my own, deciding to leave the pressures of being 'okay' for everyone else and figure out what is 'okay' for me, for my kids.  

Yesterday was a particularly hard day.  I wasn't really connected to the kids.  They haven't been around and are each struggling through their own personal work and demons and so I sat in some sorrow, quite alone and very much lonely.  Unexpectedly, my phone rang and it was a dear, dear friend. 

I have friends...I have friends who have been assigned to me and they serve a purpose.  I have friends who came and went in chapters of life.  I have clients who I have connections to resembling a friendship.  Facebook friends...a variety of friends but each group of friends is only privy to a layer of me, not all of me. 

But this friend...is someone more valuable than rubies, above anything else. 

 We have never gone for dinner, had a girls night, shared family games.  We've never done our nails, watched each other's kids or shared a recipe. We don't spend countless hours on the phone. She lives in Florida now, though she once lived in my neighborhood and ward but we rarely said hello, even in the rare moments our paths crossed. She is more than 20 years younger than me!  When Shelbie was undergoing chemotherapy the second time around, she brought over freezer meals, not because she was asked to but because she wanted to.  She gave us the gift of time for our family to do something, at a business she owned with her husband.  There was a moment in those few brief moments, when I realized I knew her before this life. We are connected in an eternal way.  She is a gift from God to me.  I wish I could say I was as in tune to her as she is to me but that has not been the case.   She is a gentle, loving, understanding soul, a warrior in fighting her own adversity; a balm of peace.  

She called and she saved me from a very hard day and I will never be able to find the words to explain how heavy the weight was she lifted from me.   All night, I rehearsed in my mind, my favorite quote...  

“Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”

― Dinah Maria Mulock Craik, A Life For A Life

Feelings safe isn't a constant in my life, not the life I have lived. Feeling safe with people is even more rare. There is so much past hurt and trauma and so much anticipatory grief and gloom and worry that I am working through.  For one hour, she was a safe harbor, the lower lights of a lighthouse I can't always see.  She let me share all my worries and work laid out before me and never once did she remind me to have faith or be more positive.  Never once did she pity me.  What a rare exchange of just love and patience.   She makes me want to be better, do better, hold on my way. 

I wish I was better at being this for others.  I wish everyone had a Kristin in their life; that beautiful angel here on earth.  Isn't it a wonderful blessing when heaven and earth connect and a millennia of time can't keep apart, something that was meant to be together...friends.