Back Down in the Trench………

If you follow my blog at all you know that I am a runner. No, not as in the kind of person that runs from the hard things in life, but the long distance runner. The running helps me switch off my mind, because I focus on one thing, breathing. I listen to all kinds of music and let the beats pound into my ears while blocking out the pounding of my feet on the street. My mind switches to off mode and most of the time I think of nothing. It is a freeing sensation, that most people just don’t understand. I am in my head all day long, with all kinds of questions. With plans of what is next, of how to move forward. So getting time where there is just peace is like being able to breathe for the first time all day.

Yesterday though on my run, my mind refused to shut down. Maybe it was because of all the things going on in the world, or maybe it was because my therapy session happened before my run instead of after. All I know is that this one thought kept creeping into the front of my mind. The hard times are not about pulling your bootstraps up and dealing with the tough time. It is about the willingness to trudge through the trench fully believing that God is trudging right next to you and his blessings have never left. So many people have told me that God must have something really good planned for my life and that I must trust him. Let me tell you trusting when are hurting is the hardest thing I have ever done. It just doesn’t happen naturally. Yet I have also learned that in grief and in mourning we sometimes have to question everything. The why, the how, everything. Here is how I know this, I had questions that needed to be answered. The thing is, Ed is just no longer here to answer them. What I learned was this, even if I didn’t get an answer, I had to ask the questions. All of them, I felt like if I didn’t ask them then I would implode. I think that I asked them to the wrong person, and that ended very badly with someone getting badly hurt. Lesson learned. Now I believe that I have found the place to ask the questions that just don’t have answers.

Oh the crying I’ve done lately, the loneliness, the missing of someone holding you is incredible. It’s not that sobbing kind of crying, it is that mourning a life kind of crying. Where the tears just silently slide down your cheeks and there is just not a thing you can do about them. Yet I feel like that is exactly where I need to be for a while anyways. To learn how to be this person. The incredible hopeless romantic that I am must face the lonely so that she never again takes love for granted. That I always understand that it can all be taken away in a blink of an eye. Thus I must trudge through the this deep valley, through the trench and learn all that I can from it. Only then will I be fully prepared to have all of that love again. Because it isn’t the fear of love that stops me from moving on, it is in the knowing of the loss. I will always believe that love is far more important than anything. That life is so hard without it. Yet one must be ready to accept that with love comes loss. And right now I have lost way too much and the thought of losing anything more ever is overwhelming. I pray that this feeling goes away, that I find that love wins yet again. I am just not there.

Dee

Author: thejourneyofalioness

41 year old mother of four. Widow since May 2019. Lives in a small Northern Oklahoma town. Loves to be out in nature and photography. "Life is not meant to be lived inside." View all posts by thejourneyofalioness