Excerpt

I went to his house to pick up the kids after class. I ended up having to stay and give both of them their breathing treatments because of the lateness of the hour. I knew by the time we got home they would be too tired to take them. It would be the longest 24 minutes ever. I sat down on the couch and held our daughter in my arms as she got her asthma medicine. She began to fall asleep, and suddenly the flashes began. The pictures unfolded. The ambivalences awakened, and there I began. Longing. And the whole time Im arguing with myself about how Im feeling. I look at the pictures of him on his wall and some photos I look at, Ill say, I hate him. With others, Im feeling like I love him and I wish I could kiss him and hold him. I look at my son sitting on his god-brothers lap playing with the computer. Then I glance down at my 2 year-old daughter falling asleep in my arms. Next, the daydreaming takes over my thought processes for the moment. I imagine myself putting her in her room, then getting in the bed with him for the night. The light is still on in the room as if he was waiting up for me. I get under the covers, look over at him. He looks tired from his day. I say, I just put her to sleep.

Flash!

I snapped out of it and immediately feltpain. I have to get out of here, I said to myself, and then imagination overtook me again. My son is in the computer chair watching Elmo and Im on our couch rocking our daughter to sleep. I think to myself, man, the house is clean, it feels good to be home with my family. This is a cozy feeling.

Flash!

I snapped out of it again. Pain is what was leftover. Pain in the pit of my belly. Like what you feel when a loved one dies, or when you hear really devastating news about a good friend, or when youre driving in a really bad rainstorm and you cant see through the windshield. You dont know how close or how far away the car in front of you is and youre afraid of being in an accident, youre saying to yourself, Lord just bring me home safely. Or how about the feeling you get when your child is helplessly sick and theres nothing you can do to make him or her feel better but hold him or her in your arms and wish the pain away.

That is the hurt that cripples us from normal functioning. These are the ambivalent feelings that leave us in a state of confusion, which is not of God. These are the events that occur in our minds that create a sea of unwanted emotions.

I remember asking God this question: When will this stop hurting? Its different when different people, under different circumstances, are hurting you at different times. But what do you do when its the same pain all the time. Even after years of separation, it still pains me to think of what life would be like if we never would have given up on our marriage. I would think by this time I would be over it and be hurt by something else. I would much rather deal with multiple hurts than the same old wound being picked at over and over and over and over and on and on and on and on. Then- Oh! Im healed, hallelujah! Then, oops! No Im not! Who wants to be bothered with that?

My sister, God has a special type of healing for this kind of pain. This perpetual pain has a perpetual remedy. Its called the peace of God which surpasses all understanding. Its called the secret place. I call this place the healing garden. In order to get the full affect of this concept, let us consider what happens in a garden.

Initially when I started to write about this, I knew absolutely nothing about the process of gardening, and really I still dont, but when I began writing this chapter, the Lord began to unction me about the process of healing being analogous to the process of gardening. So I ventured on a quest to find out just what this gardening thing was all about. I interviewed my friend, Katina, who just loves to garden. This tickled me because for the life of me, I could not understand why she was so in to this gardening thing. I mean, we probably got our houses around the same time, so when the season of gardening rolled around, we both were discussing our intentions to plant various things in our yard and transform the void we had outside of our houses into this beautiful paradise.

So, like her, I began looking for flowers, shrubs and mulch that I would like to plant. And, like her, I was so excited. I paid someone to come in and uproot about 5 large ugly trees that seemed like they were just haphazardly placed around the perimeter of my house. Once I did that, it enhanced the beauty of the house, which had been hidden behind the trees. I was getting somewhere and making progress. Next, it was time to work on the grass. I desperately wanted green grass because my neighbors green grass looked so nice! Suddenly, I became impatient with the entire project, especially when I was told that 90% of my backyard was not grass, rather it was weeds!

Of course that reality agitated me when I found out all the work that needed to be done to have this beautiful garden, I was like Forget it!

Arent we like that with life and with healing from hurts? Just when we have made some steps forward, we fall back as soon as another arrow hits us where it hurts.