Stale dated

In our culture, NOW is the only answer. Things are stale dated before they've even cooled from the oven.

Here in the world of blogging, if a blog doesn't have a post every couple of days, it grows stale and followers lose interest. Or at least that's what I'm told.

Don't we feel that way in the midst of grief? Doesn't grief become stale after a while? I'm tired of feeling sad, having nothing happy to say. Maybe someone else can find the silver lining in this, but I can't. Grief gets tiring. It's old. It's stale.

And then, from time to time, I realize that I haven't been dragging my fingers on the ground for a little while. Maybe I passed an hour when I was feeling quite all right. Maybe the sun was shining and there was a song on my lips as I was digging in the garden or doing something else. Maybe I seemed more cheerful than I have in a long time.

But that doesn't mean that my grief is over.

I feel stale because everyone else has moved on with their lives. I have too, but my life changed completely in the last year - twice. Trauma, shell shock, call it what you will - it takes its toll. So life goes on, but my mind is stuck in the old life I used to have Before.

And it's stale news. Everyone knows what happened. There's nothing new to be said about it. Except we aren't done talking about it, we definitely aren't done thinking about it. Let's face it, we'll never be done thinking about it. Our lives have changed utterly.

There are different responses to this reality:
* sense of loss and disappointment
* excitement at what new things could come out of this
* determination to survive
* desperation for anything that seems normal or attached to what is familiar
* exhaustion because everything is such an effort
* emptiness while we wait for this new life to be filled and populated

My story seems stale, but in reality it's more like a burned out forest or a dried out desert. Everything familiar died. There are a few pieces left standing, but for the most part my life has completely caved in.

Now, 14 months on, I see little shoots of green coming up through the scorched earth. I see the debris is slowly being cleared away. There are spaces where I can breathe. However, they are still small.

I'm in that place of recovery where it's easy to go too hard and then realize there isn't enough gas in the tank to see it all the way through.

Staleness can't be cured. Stale bread can be soaked and used for something else, and maybe toasted, but it can't be made fresh. There is no way to freshen up the old. It must all be made new.

As I write this, I see a distinction. Renew is not the same as new. My life has to be made new, not renewed. I will not have a newer version of what I had. I will have something completely new.

Now, in this process of staleness, I have to start letting go of the things that are made of ash now. I have to let them blow away or completely and purposefully lay them down.

God never told me that I needed to cut my husband's memory or his things out of my life. I haven't removed my wedding rings. They are still a sign of my mourning and a sign of my commitment to him now. Our marriage may have ended, but I am still married to him. Until that changes in my heart, the rings are an outward sign. That, for me, is not yet stale, although it's getting that way.

In January I did a cleanse of toxic things in my life: I unfriended people on Facebook who did not post constructive and edifying things, or who were no longer close contacts; I stopped taking responsibility for everyone else's emotions and everyone else's relationships (or at least I started that process in my mind - it's still a work in progress); I was released from terrible guilt and shame again; I began to intentionally choose the places I went and left behind places that were not building me up. I made an inward and outward declaration that I was going to live a cleaner life.

I realized that I was stale in my church, I was stale in my job (and that is still weighing upon me now), and stale at home.

I have no idea how long this process of cutting away stale parts of life takes. Perhaps, like pruning, it's an annual occurence. There are always areas God needs to correct and spruce up in our lives. However, other areas may seem stale, like grief, yet they are in process. The plant may look dead and ugly until suddenly it springs into life and produces flowers, leaves and fruit.

These are all random thoughts, not a complete finished product. I may muse on this further. However, I do want to be committed to finding all the fulness God has for me in the future. That's got to be progress, right?