We need Glue
Across facebook and text messaging and calls she reaches out, across 1,000 miles.
Over a decade ago our friendship began, mile by mile. I gave her rides around campus in my little faded blue 1980-something diesel mercedes, the one that sometimes wouldn’t shut off (how can a car have SO much character!?). I shared “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and my passion for THE Blues. She shared her tales of almost burning down her dorm with a cooking experiment. We giggled together as she told me about meeting the man that would become her husband. We were fun…so fun, and we had fun.
Now she calls, reaching out in the dark.
We share something different now.
The diagnosis isn’t there. Her baby doesn’t smile, doesn’t look at her, he has “failed to thrive,” nutrition a daily battle. The specialists are starting to pile up. And she reaches across long dark miles to ask, “Will it get better?” “Will I always be so sad?” There is a new monster and she can’t even see it’s face, know it’s game. She apologizes for sending such a depressing note, and I ache.
My words fall out on the keyboard…
Oh friend!
It is hard…and surrendering to the moment, to the uncertainty, to the different…it’s a grieving process with ups and downs. I heard someone say recently that they wanted to know that the light at the end of the tunnel wasn’t an oncoming train. It feels like that. Don’t apologize. It’s real and it hurts and it’s okay. David wrote dark psalms too…dark prayers. Just keep praying and know that He WILL give you faith to see joy beyond your the expectations that you didn’t know you had. Joy comes in the morning friend, and the morning does come. I love you friend!
I finish and then my own day comes down heavy…the friend I accidentally walked all over by mistaking her text for someone else’s (long story), the call from the hospital about growing concerns with my boys hips (when kids don’t walk the hip joints often don’t grow the right way), and this might be the reason he passed out last week when we were stretching him. The nursing changes left me with a massive headache…and mainly the longing to kick everyone OUT of my house…everyone I depend on, all the help, the therapists, the nurses. I love them dearly – they are friends, but I long to NOT NEED them…to just be just my kids and I, to be independent, to parent without other eyes on me for at least parts of the day, to discover what kind of mother I am when I’m – just me. I can’t explain it all. It’s ugly, and it’s desperate, but at the end of the day it leaves me torn…not wanting to face the day, not one more day, not wanting to need the Jesus that does “all things well.”
And I know that for my friend and I both…hope isn’t a one time fix. Faith isn’t answered in one question. Hope and faith come in these exercises…in this desperation, in the outcry, in this battle, every single day.
He is faithful…forever faithful, and in the valley we can see him rescue more than we ever ever could in the days in that 80’s mercedes. But we can’t close him out…we can’t kick him out. We need to know our need…to speak it.
And today is new, and not quite so desperate. I’m still tired. I lock myself in the office for the morning that hubbs gives me a break before work…and my M…she tells me like this “we need glue.”
Yes we do, darlin. Over and over again. Lord give us the glue.
a Rearranged Life 
I hear your heart and while I can’t relate in the specifics, I can relate in the whole. When it’s dark and hard and endless we wonder if the big, invisible God can fit Himself into the messiness that surrounds us. You are so right on…we trust Him with it all, we just wonder what it will look like when He’s done with it. There are no one time fixes, there is simply the put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other faith that believes, sinks into His word, grabs hold of His anchor, hangs on by its fingernails, and knows that it knows that God is bigger, that His ways are Higher, and that not trusting Him is a path we cannot take. Leaning into Him with you and believing that He’ll hold us up!