LIFE EBBS AND FLOWS, NURTURING THE WHOLE PERSON AND A COUNTRY ROAD THAT IS HEALING MY SOUL
It is mid-July in the south, the part of summer here where doing my hair is a lost cause. The humidity has paid a visit, and it won't say goodbye until at least October. I took the month of June off of sending out a newsletter, not on purpose, but because it seemed to fly by.
Quite a few people unsubscribed to my newsletter after I sent out my May update recapping our trip to Scotland. As an aside, that already feels like two years ago. We arrived home to our son, who had gotten sick while we were gone. Little did I know that May would be a rough month for our family. We all ended up going down with something they just called a respiratory illness. I look back on May now, and it feels like a blur. While being sick and caring for a sick household, I had pockets where I felt good enough to write my last newsletter on my reflections on home. It is one of my favorite things I have ever written, perhaps because I was writing from such a vulnerable place. I was in the weakest state I had been in since I can remember for nearly three weeks. The year we have had caught up to me, it seemed.
That month, I was brutally honest with people when they asked how I was doing. The truth is, I felt like I was drowning. There is an app called Voxer that is basically just fancy for voice texting where I stay in touch with two dear friends, both of whom are in the midst of their own kind of suffering and being stretched to the point of exhaustion of various forms. Can I just pause to say this — in this life, we will have trouble — it cannot be avoided. These ladies have been a lifeline of sorts in a season that has had us more homebound. We will leave messages of updates and needs for prayer or places where we are looking for guidance. One of the ladies on there has a knack for humor; thank the Lord because, in times that feel like we are swimming in a sea of crazy, laughter is medicine. I told these two multiple times that I thought people were avoiding me because they weren't getting generic answers about how I was doing. The beautiful thing about true friends is they don't run when things are hard.
THE EBB AND THE FLOW OF LIFE
Life ebbs and it flows; we find ourselves in disorienting times that feel like they have no end—and then they do. Troubles come, and they go, and they come again. Flowers bloom, the landscape gives way to a sea of green, the leaves fall in preparation for winter, the world quiets, the days turn grey, and time stands still. Just about the time we think it will never see the sun, it pops through the clouds, and the flowers bloom again.
After being so sick in May, I told myself that it was time to start tending to my physical body more intentionally again. We are whole people, made up of mind and body and spirit, all three a gift, all three functioning best when we can care for them properly. Some of you know that we are in the process of adopting a two-year-old boy who came into our world swiftly. He has been in our home since February and has more or less been sick the whole time, that is, until recently. The fog has begun to lift a bit over our home, and I'm feeling the ground underneath my feet for the first time in four months. We recently moved, and much to my surprise, our development backs up to a three-quarter mile stretch of country road. It's where I finish my daily run, and it's hard to explain just how much it is breathing life back into me, step-by-step.
I fostered a love for running around during my freshman year of high school. In the eighth grade, I tore my ACL along with most of the other important parts of my knee that keep it from giving out from under me. Earlier that year, while my knee was still intact, I ran my one and only cross-country season. I hated every minute of it, and even more, I hated that my mom wouldn't let me quit. As a mom myself now, I say to her, "Bravo." Anyway, it's funny how you don't know what you have until it's gone. I remember the first time I ran again after my injury. I understood then that movement is a gift, not a guarantee.
My writing is one arm of my life that I use as a creative extension, and photography has been another for nearly twenty years. Both allow me to explore my inside world and how it makes sense of the world out there. Both are forms of storytelling and tend to reflect how settled I am at any given time. Since around the age of thirty-eight, I have been healing some hard things in my past that had leaked into the ways I had been living my present. It has not been a linear path, but if you zoom out, it has looked mostly up and to the right.
I am somebody who leans hard toward reflection. I can revisit the past and sit in it for quite some time. I'm unafraid of looking in the dark corners, and for seasons of my life—maybe even subconsciously—I have hidden myself in said corners, afraid of what a healed version would have to hide behind. Who would I have to be if not needing to be rescued?
Last night, on an otherwise normal Tuesday, Chad and I played 18 holes of golf with a couple of friends. One we have known for a while and one brand new. I felt light out there, almost giddy. I noticed things that used to bring me joy but have long been drowned out—I know I'm in a rough place when beauty doesn't register an amount of awe in me. That evening, beauty broke through. I marveled over perfectly placed light, fluffy clouds, how the ground felt under my bare feet, at the long shadows at twilight on number seventeen, and how the sky caught fire as the sun set on an unblemished backdrop. Chad remarked to me after the round that he enjoyed a couple of times I busted his chops. He said that was a sign that I was a little bit lighter. And it's true. The past five months have held so much heavy and hard for us—big life changes, big decisions, hard conversations, new family dynamics, and caring for a new child who came to us quite sick. We became insular out of necessity. Even small things felt like a weight I could not lift. When we are in those moments, they feel like they will never end.
For those of you who stuck around after my golf story, I guess you get me, or at least stuck it through. If you allow me to indulge, I will tell you another one. In July of 2020, our family of three took off in the car and headed west. My hometown was our destination, approximately 2,300 miles away. Chad had a month-long sabbatical from his work. Our original plan was to fly. We were going to leave Crew with my parents in Oregon and spend some time in Big Sky, MT. Somewhere in between that plan, I got pregnant, the world shut down, and suddenly, many things we took for granted became hard and loaded with various forms of fear. We set off in the car just a few days after the doctor confirmed we had lost the baby.
This was the first time I had dealt with this kind of loss. And the first time we had experienced a global pandemic. We set off with broken hearts, a body that was physically recovering, and unsure of what travel was going to look like. We arrived at my home town just in time for July 4th. We celebrated in quiet fashion, but a memory etched in my mind of that day of Crew holding her first sparkler in the driveway. In case you were wondering, travel was predictably stressful. Truthfully, I needed a glimpse of wonder after the couple of weeks we had.
The only plan that we had for the month of July was to play as much golf as we possibly could. Chad had just taken up the game after fourteen painful years of my thinking he would never take interest. Timing is everything I'm learning. As the pandemic hit and much of life had shut down, golf was one activity that remained open. After twenty years of work being both work and a hobby for Chad, he decided it was time to embrace the gift of play. We ordered clubs and invested in a membership at a nearby course, and we have never looked back. Little did we know that what could seem like a silly game to some was the thing that allowed our broken hearts to heal. We did what we set out to do in Oregon that month. We played twenty-something rounds of golf that put us smack dab in the middle of the beautiful land I grew up in. We moved our bodies, breathed the fresh air, and allowed our minds to wander off of our loss and onto the gift of time we had to heal together.
On July 18th, we were golfing at Brasada Ranch in Bend, OR. I stood on the par three sixth hole and let my tee shot go. It flew around 116 yards, hit the green to the right of the pin, and rolled about 15 feet into the cup—a hole-in-one! For those of you who don't know golf, this is a pinnacle life moment! After I saw the ball drop, all my inhibitions left me, and out of me came pure, unfiltered joy and celebration. Our daughter Crew was riding with us in the cart to make matters better, and my parents were on the property. Through tears, my dad told Chad that I needed that. He was right. I have tears typing this now.
ON NURTURING OUR WHOLE PERSON
I guess a little piece of me was sad to lose people after sharing about golf. Not so much because my numbers fell, but more that we can easily lose touch with what makes us whole people, and nurturing wholeness best prepares us for whatever mission we have here in our short time on this earth. Think about what you would write as a biography. Perhaps you have it in that little space on Instagram? Mine reads just like this: Wife, Mother, Writer, Photographer, Golfer, and just underneath that, I have my life verse, Psalm 27:13, which reads like this, "I would have lost heart unless I had believed I would see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living."
I suppose I would add these things if there was more space or it didn't feel too indulgent. Lover of the outdoors, running, good food, quality time with family and friends, art, music, and anything that is good and beautiful and true. All of these things I will forever recognize as gifts from the Lord. All of these things have more or less felt encoded into my very DNA since I can remember.
This little corner of the internet has allowed me to share a glimpse of my life. A lot of the space so far has been taken up by reflections on the ebbs of life; truth be told, that is easy writing for me. But when life seems a little lighter, when it flows, that's part of my story, too. When life is flowing, I pick up my camera a lot more; I create more, I tap into the wonder of play; I simply enjoy life. It's not that I have earned it, but after a year and a half that has felt like labor, I can tell you that I am more grateful for a lighter offering than ever.
The purpose of this space is to find and preserve what is good, beautiful, and true. Sometimes I have to dig for it, laboring to see glimpses of the promises of God. I know I'm struggling when beauty is hard to come by. At other times, I find beauty in the mud; I take off my shoes and feel the earth move; I am in awe of the world around me. After being so sick in May, I decided it was better to embrace disorientation, to not fight the resistance. Instead of swimming upstream, I turned around and let the water take me where it was headed anyway.
I promise this won't become a newsletter about golf, but golf represents to us something bigger—the healing power of play. I told some friends the other day that it's a good sign that I'm struggling when I'm not picking up my camera much. I've taken more pictures in June than I have taken all year. And after hitting send, I'm about to hop over to that three-quarter mile stretch of country road. Thanks be to God for it all.
I hope you’ll continue to enjoy golf! I have a few life-charging hobbies of my own: weights, mountain biking (in western NC), and electric guitar. In summer I get to play baseball. :)
I love reading your golf stories 💕