Life really never, and never really stops...even when you run away for a day, or sleep an extra 30 minutes in the morning, or work on a different project for a change of scenery, or try with all your heart to convince yourself that everything is okay. Reality, duty, sunrises and sunsets, they just don't cease.
I have never been an angry person. I have a very long "fuse" (unless you bully someone or lie to me, then I have no fuse at all...hence Clint's favorite story to tell about me involving 2 punk bullies and an incident in McDonalds shortly after we were married). Actually, I can count on one and a half hands the number of times I have been truly angry during the course of my lifetime, and they have always involved bullies and lies. Old Lady Anger just isn't a regular friend of mine that comes over for tea and crumpets every Thursday at 2:00.
So imagine my astonishment and consternation at discovering that part of the biting, harsh reality of the grief process really is "anger". Just feeling so angry all the time. Not directed at God, or any one person, just anger. Oh, my head already knew this, but my soul had never tasted the bitterness of the anger that comes after so much grief and loss. Such a different angry than the few times I have experienced before! I thought I was in the clear, that I had made it through the worst and was on my way, but the compounding factors of losing loved ones, and all the other "turmoil" I have experienced over the last four years have finally caught up and hit me all at once, and hard. I guess you can only live in survival mode for so long. And so I have found myself sailing for the first time through the Sea of Anger. Just like the sunrise and sunset, I have found that there is no escape, no hiding, no shore to take me around it. The only way is through it. It is a journey that, much like the cause of it, I have had no choice but to take. And I admit it, I have really struggled! I do not like feeling mad!
I recognize that this is a journey that we all must make at some point in our lives. I am neither the first nor the last to feel it. My causes have been nothing compared to the grief others have experienced, I would never assume that or wish others to believe it to be so. By talking about it I am not negating the miraculous ways God has soothed my heart and taken such care of me. The truth is that that is precisely why I know that this trip, like all the others before that have been the precipitating factors for it, has been and will be navigated by his gentle, soothing, understanding hand. The stormy sea has been filled with buoys and lighthouses that have guided me from drowning in the depths of despair, have kept me on my course, and now I can finally see the safe harbor on the horizon and know I'll be there soon.
The clouds of sorrow are beginning to lift, the biting cold wind of hurt is abating, and the blisters from the oars of adveristy are starting to heal. My journey through the Sea of Anger during this season of winter in my life is finally drawing to a close, but has left me with more hope, courage, determination, and most of all gratitude than ever before. And an understanding far beyond anything I ever could have dreamed of. (Not to mention how buff I am now from all that rowing!)
I last wrote of the jonquils bloom in the spring and the feelings of warmth and peace they bring and why. Spring this year has been far more than just flowers blooming, the sweetness associated with them, and leaves budding out my window. They are also blooming for the first time in years in my heart. And again I say that I find myself breathing deeper, and longer, and easier. The sweet is sweeter. The brightness of the rising sun is brighter. I look around and see more richness and beauty in my life than ever before. And I know that I am immensely, profoundly, extraordinarly blessed.
I've just got to keep looking for the buoys of angels (both figurative and literal), the lighthouses of hope sent to guide me, and the feel of gentle, soothing, understanding hands that have already walked on water and calmed the angry seas, far more capable than I at navigating my course. I'm almost there...
