so sing your story; sing it until it goes from here to better and then sing about how it’s good

At the beginning of each new journal I often wonder about the content that will fill its pages.

Sometimes I would even like a peek at it.

I don’t anymore.

I’d rather live hoping for the best.

I’d rather live being shocked at the worst.

I’d rather live trusting God to handle both. To handle it all, really.

Because I never thought–not in a million years, as the saying goes–that I’d be writing this post. I never thought my journals would be filled with this content. I was just like a lot of you, I think. I’d dream of him, spend my nights wondering what he’d look like and how it would feel to fully love someone.

What I never thought about was how much it could hurt.

What I never thought about was how after you meet him, after you fully love him, he can shatter your heart into a million pieces and then throw them into the sea, leaving it up to a miracle to ever put those fragments back together again.

I guess those aren’t the kinds of dreams that little girls foster.

Those are the kinds of nightmares that women survive, and now I am one of them.

I came home from tour to the worst kind of evidence of the worst kind of choices my husband has made. And because of these choices, we can no longer be married. Because of these choices, we have both known pain that seemed reserved for a special kind of hell.

And because of these choices, God has shown up in ways that has humbled me and carried me.

We are both trying to heal, both trying to take the next best step for each of us. And though it’s true that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, I want his life to be good. I am not even mad, really. Not now, anyway. Ask me again in five minutes. I feel…so many things. But pervasively devastated, like someone in mourning. Oh, and shocked at how my sweetest of comedies could turn to a tragedy with seemingly no warning and who’s writing this script anyway? And though the word over has never held such weight, never rang with such terrible finality before, I am believing for something new and even good.

For both of us.

And I will say this: Never before in my life have I experienced such a startling contrast of love and pain. Though I have been hurt to the point where I didn’t before know it was possible to stand back up, to smile and say hello to those you see, I am also being loved. Immeasurably and in ways that I can never repay. Everywhere I turn, it seems, I am brought face to face with another kind word, another selfless act on my behalf, another encouraging note that makes it’s way inside of me and chips away just a little more of the arrows that have landed there.

God knows that I am the desert and these harbingers of love are the rain.

I have cried because of the pain and I have cried because of the love and I don’t see myself stopping anytime soon; I have felt like nothing, wondering how all the parts of me could drain out so quickly and leave my heart still beating–wondering why my silly heart didn’t get the memo that I had died, that my spirit had flown to a safer place; I have wanted to close my eyes to the world, close my eyes to the many days that stretch before me like some kind of impossible life sentence to endure; and I have also seen, despite everything and against all odds, a bit of beauty brake through. A bit of beauty that had the audacity to tell me that my life isn’t over.

That’s right, my life isn’t over.

Because there are still dumb jokes to be made.

Still people to whom and with whom I need to share my story.

Still songs to be sung and outfitted to this new adventure upon which I am embarking, ready or not.

And still blank pages in a journal.

A journal that will be filled with content that says everything about redemption and nothing about bitterness.

I hope, anyway.

And hope. Isn’t that the point, anyway?