Whirlwinds: Transformation and Presence
I did not intend to take a three month break from writing in this space, but sometimes the whirlwinds of life take you to new places or land you in a pile of rubble. By the time you catch your breath and still yourself to listen to your own soul, you can’t believe the number of weeks or months that passed. My last few months was one of those whirlwinds.
My husband and I had discussed the idea of downsizing for awhile, but having no consensus on where we wanted to be for the next season of life, we had not made any concrete plans to do so. Our oldest child, not quick to embrace change, did not like the idea of us moving, even though he does not live with us and his job will move him to DC before the end of the year, but then Pancho died, we had a good opportunity to sell our house, and the unraveling began. One day my son, showed up to take a walk with Grizzly and me and said, “Mom, maybe it is a good idea for you and Dad to sell this house. It’s just not the same pulling into the driveway without her.” Pancho was known for her vigorous tail-wagging and meeting you at the car door -right up to her last day. I guess he spoke for all of us. Though Grizzly and Wally kept things lively in the house, there was a stillness in the yard that spoke loudly of loss.
It wasn’t just Pancho, though a good dog is worthy of grief. Pancho embodied an era, a season of childrearing and making home and being home for our family. She represented a season of building, growing, acquisition and launching. We parented elementary schoolers, teenagers, sent them to college and started grad school and hosted engagement parties while in that house. That house was simultaneously ‘home of the bride’ and shelter to recover from trauma in 2018. That yard is where the invitation came to me, “Be willing to let your life change.”
When I think about the three years since that invitation that seemed to speak from Grizzly’s face to mine, I see that almost nothing was as it appeared in my life at that time, starting with my own self. I’ve written about the death of Julie the Cruise Director, my healing from trauma, and the twist and turns of my spiritual journey. Along with way, I’ve known very little of what was around the next curve, only that God assured me I could claim it all as His own.
Right now I find myself in seminary, halfway through a Masters in Divinity. Embracing that meant letting go of long-held and not necessarily deeply-examined ideas about both God and myself. Someone told me the first year would be deconstruction, and it was. The second and third, thankfully, are reconstruction. I’ve become an Anglican, but that meant leaving behind a church that had been home for twenty-four years. I spent the Covid-19 year grieving that change in the midst of all the loss the world was experiencing. Today, I am working on a ministerial staff. Between that and my seminary studies, I log way more hours than a woman my age thought she could. I find myself living temporarily in a small cabin at the lake, most of my worldly goods stored in a warehouse, and having no idea where the next permanent home will be.
The above paragraph was much easier to write than live. Implicit in those kind of changes is conflict. We live in relationship to others and personal transformation affects everyone in our webs. When the inevitable instability surfaces in relationships, the temptation is to go back, return to old patterns, play the role you know so well, just to keep the peace with those you love. It won’t work because you can’t unsee what you’ve seen, but still we try. My spiritual director, said recently, “If we believe in transformation (and we do), we change every decade. We are someone different.” What that means, hopefully, is that we can allow each other’s growth and persevere in love even when it’s confusing and painful; but we don’t get any guarantees. Each one has to take her own journey or do his own work.
Sometimes it is good to be busy at an unsustainable pace when the grief is acute. It wasn’t just losing a beloved dog or leaving a home we’ve raised our family in, it was accepting that the people we were who loved that particular dog and raised those children and built that home in that space and time are gone. We are becoming new; therefore, we have to let go of old.
Whoever is a believer in Christ is a new creation. The old way of living has disappeared. A new way of living has come into existence. (2 Corinthians 5:17).
We could not keep letting things pile up in the house, in the garage, or in our lives. We have to deal with stuff - material and immaterial. When you start sorting 21 years worth of stuff in a house you renovated to intentionally have a lot of storage space, you realize how much you hung on to that you don’t even remember you had. We had to open some cabinets and see that we still had VCR tapes from when our 29 and 26 year old were toddlers; yet we no longer have the equipment to play them. The obvious question then: Why keep it?
And therein lies the grief. It’s so much deeper than the stuff. The stuff shows you outwardly who you are on the inside. Along life’s way, we pick up things - pain and patterns of thinking or being or doing- and then store them away without asking ourselves: Do I need this? Do I really want to keep this in my life? We don’t even remember we acquired it. We develop reactions and behaviors and keep them so long they become unconscious. We store pain like those old VCR tapes; buried deep in a cabinet, unexamined for years on end.
Dismantling a home you’ve lived in 21 years is a monumental task. It should take months, probably. We did it in a few weeks. Our minds were quickly exhausted by the thousands of decisions that go into packing every box or stuffing every trash bag. Our bodies reminded us nightly that we are no longer in our thirties, full of energy and able to push through on willpower. For about three weeks, the pace was insane. But for the grace of friends and a good moving company, we would not have made it to the finish line. The packing and moving coincided with the second half of a quarter of school. I was taking a Biblical exegesis class in Greek, probably one of the hardest of my seminary studies. My final papers were due within 6 days of the closing date.
You can only ask your sister to come pack your china for several hours while you sit on your backside with a MacBook in your lap and write papers. God showed up in suntanned girl-skin with hot pink toenails and packed every plate and crystal glass I own. He also came as three friends who filled their SUV’s with loads for Goodwill and as two more who brought a hot meal to us. He also sent dessert! He sent text messages and songs, reminding me that he had an army praying for me while I went from studies to work to packing from before dawn to bedtime day after day after day.
I write these last two paragraphs to remind myself and you (dear readers), that God is in the whirlwind. He is there in the busy, the pain, the grief, the loss, the change, the chaos, the old falling away and the new beginning. We miss him sometimes because we fail to remember that He might sound like a friend pulling strapping tape across a cardboard box or smell like almond cake. We miss him because God in his body might not look like our former versions and images. We miss him because we couldn’t let go of the old and embrace the new.
If this reads like a whirlwind, so be it. This is what transformation looks like - spinning chaos! Written into creation is the old-becoming-new cycle. Written into Scripture is movement - God’s people continually on the move, aliens and exiles journeying toward a home, dismantling and reconstructing over and over again. But He is there - in the cloud by day and the fire by night, in the hands and feet of your neighbors and your friends, in the smiles and in the tears.
Claim it all as His own.
