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Packing up the Pieces

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*Cue packing/moving as an extended metaphor for the transition between different life stages*

I can’t help but look back when I start packing up my stuff. I can’t help but be paralyzed by little scraps of paper I find with notes written by friends I’ve tucked into random books. I agonize over whether to keep a pedometer my Mom gave me. Isn’t it funny, how one of the last things she gave before she was diagnosed, was a pedometer that counted your steps? Her and I were going to compare step counts and encourage each other to be healthier. and here I am, still taking steps. One foot in front of the other into the future! And yes, I know a silly piece of plastic doesn’t represent her memory, but somehow I still carry her desire for me to be strong and healthy with me. I got all of that out of a plastic pedometer.

So yeah, being an introverted writer makes packing efficiently IMPOSSIBLE. A chipped mug is my 20th birthday present from my sister. A scrap of paper can be repurposed for an art project. A half-used tube of toothpaste represents the fragility of living in a dental conscious world (ok that one I made up). Jesse has been secretly (slash I kinda have him permission to) throwing things away while I was recovering from my wisdom tooth removal last week because he knows I get emotionally attached to household objects. (Remember the hoarding candy thing I talked about in my last post?) Sometimes it feels like if you hold on to these objects for just a little longer you can keep your memories safe. Or you will never find yourself in need. Unlike the popular book/philosophy of the day, ALL of these things give me joy. But I guess you have to limit yourself to a cardboard memory box of little trinkets before they become a whole drawer or room of junk.

You have to decide which pieces of yourself are worth carrying on into the next stage, and which ones are bringing you down. Perhaps part of you got dropped from the moving truck and can’t be put back together. That’s alright. Put a scrap of it in your mental memory box and move on.

Also, if none of that works just marry somebody/hang out with someone who loves and embraces change and try to catch the excitement bug from them. Just hide your important “valuables” from them so they don’t end up in the goodwill pile 😀

There’s Enough

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As a small child I had a candy drawer in my room where I would put all of my candy. The only problem is that I would never eat it. I just wanted to hoard it away in my room for a time when I would want/need candy. Just in case. Pretty soon my siblings caught on and started sneaking into my room when I wasn’t there and helping themselves to whatever they wanted/needed. I didn’t find this out until years later, of course. Tons and tons of delicious confectionaries simply wasting away in an old dresser drawer.

Here are some things I consider myself gifted at:

Roadtrip playlists.

Taking random ingredients leftover in the fridge and making something edible

Writing. Editing papers.

Taking one look at the people I love and immediately knowing something is wrong.

Great skills, right? I’m sure your list is even more impressive.

Now imagine I took my ability to find the perfect song for our upcoming road trip and kept it “private” on my Spotify account. Of if I noticed that you were upset, and didn’t say anything or even give you a nice note. I put it in the proverbial “candy drawer,” to waste away. You’d be upset, I think. Or at least confused.

They will be like a tree planted by the water that sends out its roots by the stream. It does not fear when heat comes; its leaves are always green. It has no worries in a year of drought and never fails to bear fruit.”

Jeremiah 17:8

We start to believe that our trees are planted in the drought. We think that if we give away our talents, gifts, and expertise we will find no more left. We start limiting our root supply. There are different seasons, and yes, sometimes your leaves are a bit wilt-y. But if you have a tree full of delicious and beautiful fruit, God never intended for it to rot.

My Grandma’s house always seemed like a place of abundance to me. It still feels that way. In the summer we’d pick her berry bushes for hours and hours in the hot August sun and there would still be more left. Our buckets would spill over with more than enough berries for pies, crumbles, jams, and plain-old snacking. If you still had any energy left you could climb the ladder and pick pears from the top of the fruit tree. As if that wasn’t enough the rose garden covered the entire white fence in front of the barn. And inside the house? Not one, but two fridges! One fridge with an endless supply of ice cream and Pepsi, and another stocked with leftovers and ingredients for dinner. and you almost never leave her house empty handed.

God’s stores are even better stocked. He never runs out.

and he wants you to share. Not to compete, or edge out, or put down. To give and give abundantly. God loves us cheerful giver, not a frazzled, worn out, tree without a root supply. So give what you have to offer, which may not be what is expected, but it is needed.

It’s Finished.

Usually by the time I write a blog post about a certain topic, the feeling and energy behind it is no longer raw. Writing completes and smooths over weeks of thoughts, feelings, and unsolved riddles. Writing is in and of itself a solution. Have a problem? Write about it for a while and you’ll find that the act of writing is in and of itself a form of action. By the time you put pen to paper or keyboard clicks to screen you’ve come to place where you can put words to your ideas, and that’s a powerful statement. I  know that if I skirt around a certain topic, that I’m not ready to write about it. I’m still wrestling with it. and that’s ok. It’s alright to be a little raw.

I blame cancer for messing up my social life.

Yep, that’s completely rational. I hate that I had to move up my wedding. I hate that I had to move out of my house with my roommates with no time to say goodbye. I hate that I didn’t have the energy to hang out with with anybody for months and months. I planned a girl’s night at the place I was currently staying as an attempt to bring normalcy to a season of turbulence. Then we got the news that she had to stop chemotherapy and it was almost over. The flight was still in the air, and I just wanted to be grounded. I just wanted to land in a place that looked like home.

I still sometimes operate under the false reality that no friend will truly want to let me in, because they’re afraid of my pain. I know I’m not the only one who feels like this sometimes.

I don’t want to pray out loud in small groups. I used to prophesy in front of a hundred people.

I now avoid the medical aisle of the supermarket. I also used to avoid the medical aisle of the supermarket, because I didn’t need anything from that section. So I guess that’s the same, right?

I blame cancer. But the cancer is gone now. And I’m still here. And I have the agency to change. We all do. We can carry our scars like baggage or let them sink into our skin and accept they are woven into our story.

Just when you have collected the pieces and decided you like what you’ve created. It’s time to move again. It’s time to leave. Just when you’ve become comfortable and accepted the ways things are it’s time to move on again. Kicking and screaming. Or like a kid who sticks their head out the window of the U-Haul on a cross country moving trip. You just need some air to breathe. It’s time to get going again. It’s time to start planting seeds and harvest. It’s time to cry and it’s time to laugh.

It’s time to move on.

It’s time to take your broken heart and keep walking.

It’s time to start again.

The past is finished. Jesus died on the cross, and he said it’s finished.

Every once in a while, if I have a really busy shift at work where the line goes out the door for hours on end, I’ll continue to dream that I still need to slice cake the following night. I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and be convinced that I have a whole Belgian chocolate torte in my hands and that there’s a customer waiting for me to deliver it. The only way I can fall back asleep is if I tell myself “We’re closed! The shop is closed!” The shift is finished. The work is done. Now it’s time to rest. It’s finished.

The suffering has, for now, stopped. But life continues on.