Dwelling Inside the Good

Sometimes I think the breaking point in my marriage was the day the basement flooded.

I had spent most of my adult life trying to be “the good mom, the perfect wife”. I spent hours and hours creating scrapbooks and photo albums, collecting memories that I thought would be so important to document for my kids and future grandchildren. I had made the choice to be a stay-at-home mom and I poured my heart and my love into being the best I knew how to be. Hours of building a home from scratch, days and months and years of collecting just the right bits and pieces to make their home great, to make their keepsakes memorable and artistic. I spent so much of myself I often wonder if I lost me in the process of trying to be perfect.

I beat myself up for awhile. I should have placed those precious picture books high on a shelf or in some special trunk or container that would keep them safe. But instead, they were stacked on the floor, on new carpet in a room I cherished as a safe haven where I made my creations or spent time alone in prayer or healing of self. There on the floor, my sons’ scrapbooks sat in water that seeped through the floor and walls and flooded the rooms that had taken my ex-husband and I so long to design, create and build.

Something completely broke inside me that day. I came home to the emotions of those who were already frantically trying to bail the water out, to salvage what could be salvaged. All I could see, all I could think about were those books. And what it meant to lose not only the images saved, but the energy and love I had spent on something that could be taken away in such a short amount of time - as short as a thunder storm/torrential rain.

I’m thinking now about how disasters can rob you of your identity. They can steal away a lifetime of hard, honest work. They can erase within moments all the moments that you spent being who you are. Within seconds, so much can be erased and never again replaced or retrieved or found.

It’s at those times, through all the shattered chards and all the broken bits and pieces that we start creating a new mosaic. At times when a person thinks there is no possible way to move forward, they find out movement is inevitable. It is at those pivotal junctures where you discover there’s really no control to be had, only a sense of weightlessness and surrender, a floating into the arms of whatever this life is about. There is simply a will to go on so you begin by sifting through, dusting off, shaking away and allowing life to take you wherever.

I don’t doubt any more that there is mercy and grace buried inside of trials, buried inside of tragedy. And there is an energetic, live and tangible peace there, too. And sometimes we have to be rattled to the core, removed from all we’ve ever been and known in order to finally reconnect and feel it in our souls. Maybe minutes after or maybe years. But it’s there for us to unlock and uncover.

Today I caught myself wondering where I’d be if that basement would have held up and kept the water out. I know I wouldn’t be the one I am today. I wouldn’t have the same experiences or the same encounters.

I am pretty certain there is a huge advantage to seeking out the good even through all the bad. Focusing on the positive changes everything. It doesn’t take away the hurt or the negative or the pain of what happened unjustly or unfairly, but it empowers life to turn things around for the better, it opens up the flood gates of goodness.

“Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.”