"Everything Happens for a Reason..."

“Everything happens for a reason”…

I’ll bet that I’ve stated that a million and one times over my lifetime.  And yet, when I saw my little camper cut in two and thought of the blood, sweat, and tears that went into it, I just couldn’t see a reason.  As minor as losing a camper is in the whole big scheme of things, I felt as crushed as that camper. 

 

 I believe that sometimes things happen to give us an external visual expression of how we’re feeling internally.  This offers us perspective that we might never achieve if we remained “in our heads” about it.  It has been a year since my neighbor at the lake called me to tell me that the hurricane on Sept. 11, 2017 had wreaked havoc on our trees resulting in one falling right down the middle of my little camper parked in the driveway where I had been restoring it.  All the way to the lake, I mentally grieved that which was a loss only to me. I was the only person on the planet that cared about that camper and the healing work that it represented to me.  For this reason, the loss felt like a direct attack on me personally from Hurricane Irma.  I wasn’t sure what to even do when I pulled up at the lake and saw it, so I just started pulling it apart and freeing it from tree limbs.  I struggled to focus on my Dad’s familiar refrain “It could always be worse.” as I did feel thankful for the lake house being spared yet I grieved my loss.  I struggled because the camper felt like one big representation of my life right at that moment and through the visual representation of the “camper carnage”, I knew some things in my life were also over. 

~In January 2017, I had finally acted on my dream of building a counseling retreat center and partnered with someone who had been working with me to build it.  For 8 months, we worked together, planned, and constructed my dream, and then in August, my partner decided to head in a different direction with the project leaving me scrambling to discover the next path for my counseling practice.

~In April 2017, my Daddy was in a horrendous vehicle accident, and I spent the next 2-3 months focusing almost solely on his care.

~In September 2017, we sold the house that my boys knew as their home for 11 years.

~Though a long-time coming, my marriage of 18 years had reached a point of finality which brought much grief over our changing family dynamics.

~The barn-house that I designed was delayed in construction leaving me feeling displaced, exhausted, and searching for daily solutions.

Each one of these situations was a lot to deal with each in it’s own regard, but all together, it felt crushing just like that tree on my little camper.  Just like my inclination to jump right in and drag the debris away, I jumped into each of the situations that I was dealing with to effect whatever change I could into the situations. 

In the middle of my clean-up that day, my cousin, Laura called me.  She said, “I know this sounds crazy, but I keep getting these words for you: ‘It is finished.”  I instantly knew when I heard those words that they were gifted to me through her in order for me to begin the process of Acceptance. 

But oh, I was so mad!  Not at her, but I instantly retorted, “No! It is most definitely NOT finished!”

I thought,  I’ll keep working on it…all of it…but especially the camper…my visual representation of it all…”  As the months wore on, and I saw that even the frame of the camper was bent…the very foundation was not stable (what a metaphor for the other areas of my life in disarray!)…

I knew that I had to accept the loss.

Acceptance did not come quickly…in any situation.  It did however, come slowly over months and months of working on it.  I realized that each of the situations that I was dealing with carried huge loss but also promise.  Within each of the situations, there were blessings.  Through the months, I learned to be thankful for the blessings, grieve the losses, and accept the realities.  I worked at plugging away at the debris of the losses while rebuilding a new reality. 

Acceptance…for a word that made me feel so weak when I first tried to wrap my mind around it, it sure did take a lot of strength to achieve! 

It took realizing that acceptance is active, not passive. 

It’s empowering, not resigning. 

It stimulates forward movement, not apathy. 

So, I've learned that while the wreckage is ugly, the new "sprouts" of growth are even more beautiful that we could ever imagine.