We were sitting across a narrow table from each other, just
as we had been once a week for the previous 4 weeks. I barely knew her, but we
had committed to gathering, her and a few other people, each week simply in
casual purposefulness. For laughter mainly, but also to stretch our minds a
bit. What captured me the most, the first time we met, was her ease as she came
into the room. She brought with her relaxation and self-comfort. And she brought “you are immediately going to
like me”. I, in contrast, don’t exude relaxation. I, can at times, exude all-wound-up.
Tightly-wound- up in fact. But not her, she sauntered to your picnic table and
even before she sat the calm trickled across the splintered wood.
I literally can count on two hands the things I know about
her, all collected one by one over the 4 nights, barely 8 hours, we have been gathering,
but you don’t have to have knowledge to know you have delight. However, I live
in this state of awareness, ever since the perpetual waiting rooms of
mastectomy, of realizing that people flow into and out of your lives for very
specific purposes. God sends, I call them.
Today, hers started to unfold.
“Sally, I read something this week on your social media page…..”
I’d been on social media only once this week so I immediately
recalled the post. She was speaking of my reference to my brother’s death.
I don't really know how
exactly to explain this. Maybe if you've lost an older sibling it might make
sense to you, but there is something strange about approaching, and soon to be
passing, your brother in age. Is your older brother suddenly your younger
brother? Of course not, but it's a strange phenomenon. I'm soon going to look
older than my older brother. He will always look 44 in my mind. Me, the younger
sister, well I'm going to surpass him. These are the things I'm thinking about
today as tomorrow brings me another year closer. So grateful God continues to
remind us of his mercy and grace when life and its turns don't always make
sense.
I was also intrigued at the timing of that because she and I
had only found each other on FB the day before I made that post.
“I, too, lost my older brother back when I was in college.”
I won’t speak more of that story because her story is not
mine to tell, but I will say it was a tragic event and as she spoke, it was as
if the 3 feet of table space between us became 2 inches and the moments of the 4
longitudinal days of knowing each other magically morphed into 4 years. Her eyes became deeper, her calm more
familiar, her lines…as if I’d known them my whole life.
It’s remarkable, now in I’ve-experienced-it-awareness, how
commonality in one singular impacting experience can create time and remove
distance.
This is the 4th time this has happened. People that I have
known for a long period of time (in this case a short period) where following
my brother’s death I have found out that they, too, at some point had tragically
lost a brother. And there are countless
others that had prematurely lost a brother from natural causes.
Four. We both
remarked it was the club you didn’t want to be in, but found comfort in finding
other members.
We sat there for the next however many minutes, I completely
lost all sense of time, place, and surroundings, discussing my past year and
how I was still navigating the ins and outs of tragedy. And she…well she sat and listened.
It’s never been lost on me the purposefulness of God, but after I got home I cocooned myself in the knowledge and grace of His provision.
Provision of how God aligns our life with people in circumstance. He strategically placed 4 people (some before
Andy’s death, some after) in my path with similar circumstance to swaddle me in
the accolades of “you can do this, you are normal, you are not alone” because
we did it before you and paved the path. And He strategically places me in the
path of others who have walked this same path behind me to help breathe life
back into their breathless lungs when they find themselves suddenly unable to
inhale. But who in their moment thinks about that? The day Andy died I
certainly wasn’t thinking “oh great, now I can help someone else through
accidental shootings.” It came to me rather quickly, because of my history with
life coming at you fast, but it took some time. But imagine if it did (come to you quickly). I’m
getting more in tune with that, this finding myself in the moment realizing
that event in the midst of chaos, no matter how tragic and disappointing, that
God promises to do grace in and through you if we simply step on board. The key
is staying on board before the moment even strikes. Aligning myself with his
promises daily so that the promises continue to bleed out of me in the chaos. But
most of all remembering that Life isn’t about me, my story is his, and life is
all about the people he places in my life.
That’s why on occasion I spill my guts out to you on these
very pages, but I can’t tell you how many times I have walked away from this
screen unwritten because I didn’t have the uummmpph to tell “that story”. Back
in 2012, I promised God, that if he was taking me to mastectomy, then I was
going to take that story for his purposes. I tried to carried that through with
Andy. And hopefully will continue with that in the whatever comes next. But
more so than being public on these pages, it’s more important that I get down
into the trenches, one-on-one, in people’s lives with these experiences. Anyone
can write a blog post. But how many people will do life with you, even the
tragic moments when everything gets rough, and actually do it well? You all have your own story. But what are you
doing with your story (I have to ask
myself this every day)? And are you allowing God to align you in such a way
that you too can say, "It’s remarkable, you won’t believe who I met at the
picnic table…"
