Life: the Greatest Spoiler Alert

Have you ever watched a movie when some precious soul has already spoiled the ending for you?  Somehow while your friends are biting their nails and tearing up like puppets on the director’s strings, you’re sitting there thinking, “I can’t imagine how we’ll get to the ending that precious soul already filled me in on”.  You’re not stressed, you’re just interested to see how the story unfolds.  When you know the ending, you watch the movie through very different eyes.

Exactly one year ago, if you had told me how the next year of my life would end it would have seemed as wild and foreign and unbelievable to my little homebody self as the Hollywood make-believe movie screen.

My book, Chronic Blessings was about to release and I thought that would be the big event of my year.  It became the foot note.  The asterisk to the story of Cristy’s year that states, “oh yeah, and she also had a book published.”  Not that it wasn’t important.  It was incredible to me because so many have told me how important and life changing it was for them.  I am awed and humbled by how it has been shared and passed on. But the meaning and depth of that was hidden in the fog of my own life events.

So, what wouldn’t I have believed if you had tried to tell me?

·       Your independent, funny, pie baking grandma will have a fall while simply walking into her home and although she will live a few days, she will never speak or recognize anyone again.

·       Your cousin will take her own life.

·       You will lose another family member and two from your church family within the same month as the other losses. 

·       After becoming curious about an old building near your home that is partially burned, your children will take a walk around it to get a closer look at what they believe to be an abandoned shack.  They will be prosecuted for trespassing.  The judge will threaten your terrified 11-year-old with jail time if he trespasses again.  He’s already anxious and scared of accidentally making another unintended mistake like this again.  Now he’s afraid to play outside.   

·       Your uncle’s cancer will return.  One weekend he will drive your kids around in his boat and the next he will be gone.

·       One of your kids will experience such severe bullying that attending school won’t be possible.  The fears, anxiety and depression of your sweet baby will throw your entire household into a tailspin.  This on top of the grief from all the deaths will prove to be too much for your other children to handle.  Everyone will fall apart.

·       At the height of all the chaos, you will uproot your whole family.  You will abandon the place where you grew up, the only home your children know and the house that holds all of their childhood memories.  You will leave your parents behind, alone in their grief.

·       You will have to adjust to three new schools, new jobs, a new house in a neighborhood (with the master bedroom upstairs—big potsie no-no).

·       The trauma of the bullying will follow you and you will spend the first weeks in your new home scrambling to find the right help and late nights futilely attempting to calm panic attacks.

I’m telling you, I’d have either laughed in your face or punched it.

And so here we are after surviving a horrific year.  Living in Pennsylvania of all places, a state I’m so unfamiliar with that auto correct keeps reminding me I’ve spelled it wrong.  Making the decision to move here was SO difficult.  I felt like we were crazy, like I was crazy because believe it or not, homebody me was the one pushing to make the move.  I’m the one who gets so attached to places, the one who wants to be close to my family, my parents.  Especially in times of loss!!  But I had an inexplicable desire to come here that could only be God given. 

Perhaps I will tell more details another time, but let’s just say God rolled out the red carpet for us.  He showed up and showed off… big time.  He lined up the jobs. (Very rare jobs that we didn’t think existed.) Our house sold at the perfect time, we got an amazing new home… wait for it… next door to my brother!!!  God must really like my bro to have blessed him in this way.

I’ve never wanted a big house.  I always loved the small enoughness of our old home.  I liked that there wasn’t too much to take care of.  But with our family’s struggles and dynamics, the extra space has made an incredible difference in the stress levels and health of everyone.  Everyone has space, so the house isn’t crazy loud and there isn’t incessant commotion, therefore anxiety and sensory issues don’t explode.  My dizziness and migraines aren’t triggered all the time.  And can I just say, my woman-brain stress levels don’t go through the roof every time I enter my house now.  Because luxury of all luxuries, we have room to store things.  There isn’t clutter EVERYWHERE.

We aren’t so isolated.  We have family next door, including a precious niece and nephew, so hello, double yard for all of them!  AND the kids can have friends in the house… a lot.  We live in a sweet little neighborhood and we have room to have friends!  Six kids in this house last night, on a school night, everyone having fun, no fighting.  And I didn’t have to plan it way in advance with all the parents and do a bunch of driving with kids, triggering migraines. 

The kids’ schools are providing what they each specifically need.  The school has been phenomenal in helping my bullied child and the counselor has bent over backwards to support him.  The kids are home 90 minutes more each day because their bus rides are so much shorter!  My child who struggles with homework does not have an hour of do every night.  They have time to actually read for fun and be kids again.  AND I don’t have to drive them to meet the bus.  Hello again my friend, less migraines.

We live in a beautiful spot.  I’ve always wished we didn’t live in someplace totally flat.  There are mountains all around and there are beautiful hills everywhere.  Its not so hot!!!  I have felt so much better.  It’s been unreal the amount of activity I’ve been able to handle.  Ever since we made the decision to move it’s like God provided all the energy needed.  I mean, I danced (well, let’s be accurate here, I moved on a dance floor) at a wedding last weekend for a couple hours without getting dizzy, in the middle of lots of people… with heels on.  I don’t even wear heels anymore because I can’t balance in them!

So, what’s the point of all this rambling?  Well, in the interest of continuing the rambling, we just hung a beautiful rustic wooden picture on our wall.  It has simple lines of mountains and it says “difficult roads often lead to beautiful destinations”. 

I.  Love.  That.

All five of us keep sitting back in awe of how much better our lives are here.  We miss Virginia.  We miss my parents.  (Don’t get me started on that.  In fact, all my aunts and uncles are there this weekend to be together at the anniversary of my grandma’s accident and passing. And I’m not there. I remember last year at this time being so thankful I lived there and could be with them all for the entirety of the whole heartbreaking experience. I can’t even.)  But, everything about our lives is working better here.  There is still scary stuff to get through.  I’ve just started my new job and it’s SO intimidating.  Yet, we know we are where God has placed us, and we are already seeing the benefits in so many ways.  We never would have come here if it weren’t for the difficult roads we’ve traveled.  Several of which I haven’t even mentioned, but there were many difficult things that made a move necessary.

When I think back to how terrifying the idea of moving was, how grief stricken we were over making that decision—Now I’m terrified at the thought of where our lives would have gone if we hadn’t taken that leap.  It’s easy to see here on the other side, with all the pieces in place.  If we could have known then what we know now, it wouldn’t have been difficult at all.  We wouldn’t have suffered so much.

This is just one year, one chapter in my life.  But I know you go through rough, devastating spells too.  And you get so knocked down by the details, the events.  My prayer is that you and I both wouldn’t focus on the details or even the story arc of our whole life but that we’d remember we’ve already read the final chapter and the epilogue.  No matter how shocked we may feel by how the current plot line is unfolding, never mind that.  Our lives are one big spoiler alert.  We know the end of the movie.  We know the outcome.  We each had some precious soul who loved us enough to spoil the ending.  We can sit back and think, “I can’t imagine how we’ll get to that point from here, but it’s going to be interesting to see how this story unfolds.”