Where I Have Been (here it finally is)

I have tried to write this post for 6 months because I knew I couldn’t keep writing about other things with this in the way. And yet, I didn’t (still don’t) fully know how to balance my need to be real with my family’s need for privacy.

Even writing that sounds ridiculous to me. If all of you reading were people I would recognize on the street or old friends from college, I could have written this post and a thousand others in the past half year. But since many of you dear friends and fellow bloggers have come to this space on the world wide web by way of my sister’s or my husband’s music, I have this other responsibility to consider when I sit down to write.

And before last fall, that mostly meant trying not to be too provocative or not saying everything I think has strongly as I might think it. In 3 years of blogging, that balance was something I had learned to live with. After last fall, it became a huge concern that I wasn’t sure how to manage. Suddenly the stakes over sharing about my personal life had a list of consequences longer than I could even come up. I kept writing as long as I could think of ways to write something other than this post. But then I couldn’t anymore.

And I quit answering email. I quit even opening my email, if you want to know the truth. I opened it about a month ago and had almost a thousand unopened messages. I quit writing. I quit doing the Bible Study I set up. I quit seeing almost anyone outside of my family. I started shopping at Walmart late enough at night or early enough in the morning to avoid seeing anyone I might know.

You see, it feels very unnatural for me to not be able to just process out loud or in print. Its very unnatural for me to hide things. I just can’t go on with life with a big fat elephant in the room. I am the person who has to talk about the elephant or analyze it or make a joke about it to avoid insanity.

And I have been living with it now for almost a year and I finally decided I am losing too much of what I love and who I am to coexist with all of this disconnection. I can’t be connected and hide.

So the plausible, logical solution is to stop hiding right? So with the blessing of my husband I am going to open up and bring some things into the light.

Last August, my world crashed. Its no secret that Shawn and I have struggled in our marriage, with each other, and ultimately with ourselves as we have tried to navigate living together and becoming One. The secret, I guess, has been that a little over a year ago, everything we were trying so hard to hold together completely fell apart. Through a series of events, all of the wounds we had inflicted on one another and all of the loss and pain had culminated into a huge obstacle we weren’t sure we would ever be able to overcome. We were sure we couldn’t continue to try to work on it alone and with the schedule we’d been keeping.

After a lot of tears on both of our ends, and with as much consideration as either of us could manage under incredible stress and heartache, we made a gut wrenching decision. There were no good options, as far as we could tell, but we made the best choice we knew how, which Praise God! turned out to be the right one.

We put our house on the market, Shawn moved to Michigan to live with dear friends of mine who felt the call of God to get into this mess with us, and I moved back with my parents. I don’t think the shock wore off until months later, when I decided I was far too old (even though I was in a rough place) to live with Mom and Dad. I rented the bottom floor of my Aunt’s beautiful old brick house and Cohen and I moved in and tried to make it feel like home. I started working part time to help with the financial stress created by our decision to push the record and tour back so Shawn could spend some uninterrupted time in Michigan with our beloved friend and pastor, Jason.

There were moments of hurt that go to places I cannot describe, moments of relief for being close to my parents and in a fresh, new place, moments of confusion that kept me up at night no matter how tired I was…so much questioning, so much disappointment, so much disbelief that this could be happening to me, to Co, to us.

I kind of feel like I imploded.

Like a building that gets blown up from the inside out and just falls in on itself. I felt nothing for months I was in such shock, but when I did I just felt like I had caved in. And although it happened months and months before- the initial damage, I mean- I think around the first of the year, I began to feel it. I began to see how broken everything was..some bit of acceptance set in and I was faced with coming to terms with the reality of the situation and my life or going crazy.

And I can tell you that coming to terms with this has been very painful. I have vacillated between anger at Shawn, myself and God and then had weeks of sadness and regret that feels impossible to shake. I have had times of just numbing myself with TV or food or sleep because facing the idea of possible “divorce” is too much for my brain to handle. I have had pockets of hope that have been followed too closely by experiences of doubt. I have struggled to read my Bible, cringed at the thought of prayer, and felt a tangible distance between God and I that I have never before known.

I know.. but I kept writing until February…

You see in January things reached a peak of ugliness and if someone had asked me right then and there, I would have unequivocally said I was going to be divorced. Hope felt deferred. And the Bible isn’t being dramatic when it says that will make the heart sick.

I went to my sister’s beautiful and glorious wedding in March still unsure of my future. Things had gotten somewhat better and there seemed to be a light at the end of a this very long and dark tunnel, but doubt never left my mind and there was very little room for peace.

After the wedding I learned from a friend of my Mom’s that a rumor was running around the music industry that Shawn and I were divorced. A former radio personality, she tried to convince the people who were saying that of the truth: that we were not divorced and that no papers had been filed. She suspected they only believed she was trying to protect family friends. I came home that night and typed a blog I never posted aptly titled “I am not Divorced” But then I thought about it and realized I didn’t want to post it and then have to post another blog “I am Divorced” a few months later if the small ground we had made crumbled beneath our feet. Plus, I didn’t know or really want to know if the rumor had seeped out of the industry and into the rest of the CCM music listening culture. I hope it hadn’t. I still hope that. I hope this blog isn’t something you’ve been waiting to get the scoop on, but rather is somewhere out of left field.

Still, I am writing this because now a year after the initial blow, a year filled with shrapnel continuing to teeter and then fall into the pile of rubbish inside, I can say something I know now really is true.

God really is good.

The sun is shining this morning after a long, loud, lightning punctuated Ohio storm. Cohen is eating Cheerios and do his completely engrossed in his “First Signs” dvd. I am awake and breathing air that doesn’t belong to me. I feel a sense of hope that defies my situation and the bleakness of it and the depth of darkness I have been walking through. Sometimes God still seems like an old friend that I love but whose faces I sometimes can’t bring to mind quickly. The Bible can be hard to grasp and prayer is still in the stage of awkward conversation and fumbling words.

But yesterday I felt a yearning for it again. It was so unusual and out of place, that it was like a neon sign in my heart blinking away. I made note of it, like you do the first green shoot that pushes its way to the surface in the springtime. I went and watered it and prayed for the Son to shine down it and make it grow in a way I have learned all my wishing can’t.

This has been a year of finding out the depth of my own pride… my own incredibly naive and self-centered idea that because I grew up in a healthy, intact family and came to know the Lord as a young child that bad things couldn’t happen to me; that I couldn’t do bad things. You know what lesson I have learned the hard way? That it doesn’t take long living apart from the life-giving source of relationship with God to become a person you can’t even recognize. I have done things, felt things, said things that I would not even believe if I hadn’t experienced it. I have nurtured anger and self-righteousness when cultivating forgiveness could’ve saved me from such decay. Pastor Jason (thank God for he and his family in our lives) called it humanism. The first time he called me humanistic I wanted to jump through the phone line and choke him. No one had ever told me I was living Godless before…no one ever told me before that I was holding onto my own “rights” so tightly that I was missing God in all of the small moments He was trying to whisper something sweeter in my ear.

We were advised to “protect our family” and keep all of this private. Its not horrible advice and at the time it was probably wise. But you know what? You can’t something like this too long without becoming a liar. Without slanting conversation or twisting words to make things appear in a way they aren’t. Its poisoned me, this pretending. Its kept me from visiting with some old friends because I don’t want to explain why I live here now or where my husband is the other 70% of the time. I will catch myself thinking “but I was voted most likely to succeed” and wondering what everyone I graduated with would think to find out that the token Christian girl was living the life of a single mom, separated from her husband, and struggling to get off the couch. How prideful is that?

I know I want to get back to the place I was… to who I was. I want to leave behind the vestiges of feeling like since people we have never met know my husband’s name or can purchase his music that we have some sort of image to maintain, even when the image is in far better shape than we are.

I am done with it. We are struggling. We’ve been struggling for a long time now. Its fine to read posts about people sorting out marriage as long as they are writing from the standpoint of everything being better. Well I can’t write that post yet. And if I wait to write it, maybe I never will.

So I am going to start writing again. Right in the middle of this muck and mire and from a place where we experience glimmers of hope that we try very hard to hold on to from one little storm to the next.

I believe that God is holding us together, but some days its easy to forget when a flippant comment rubs like sandpaper against an old, unhealed wound. Its easy to forget it when I wake up in the morning to another day of single parenthood or another night of sleeping alone. Its easy to forget when Shawn heads out of the door to go back to Michigan and know it will be a few days or a week before one of us has to make the 4 hour trip again to have a short day or two of relative “normalness”

We are working at it and praying that behind the shroud of mystery that God is working a miracle of restoration that will blow our socks off and give us something really beautiful to share. We welcome your prayers to that same end.

And in the meantime the best I can say is that God is good on levels deeper than what we can see or what we live with day in and day out. And that for all of my life of trying to be good and do good in some effort to live up to making him proud, I am starting to wrestle with the idea that maybe he’s just as fond of me in this chapter of my life when I have nothing but my sinful thoughts and my pride and my doubt and my broken heart to offer Him.

Its uncharted territory for someone like me who has too often rested on the laurels of what little “good” I could muster up.

I am rambling now and Co’s video is long over. I want to just offer an apology to those whose emails have gone unanswered and to all of those who have pressed on with Engage the Journey without me. Thank you for your faithfulness and please forgive my own obvious lacking.

I am ready to roll up sleeves and get back into life. I hope I can rejoin with you and find my way back into friendship with all of you.

Kate