Experiment in Nature -72 Hour Mark – Conclusion

They say trauma affects our resiliency. If that is true, it is the best way to describe why it can be so hard to bounce back from little bumps. Day two had gone so well, we took showers and were heading to bed nicely tired, and I walked into another freaking spider web. I freaked. I believe while I was brushing my hair, I yelled at Zoya for not watching me closely enough to see if there was a spider on my head. I tried to just shake it off, literally and figuratively, and even though I was very conscious about what was happening, I couldn’t calm down enough to relax again for the rest of the trip. There is nothing like that last spider to make you question God’s goodness and whether life is worth living. Is it just me?

After the spider, I noticed the bandage had fallen off Zoya’s chin. It was supposed to fall off in 5-6 days and it was day 6 but every time I had a good look at my perfect child’s broken chin, I got so angry at … no one. Well sometimes I got angry with the doctor, who I thought did a terrible job. I just don’t handle it well when the best thing in my life gets broken. Is it just me?

It was a late night. I had a lot to work through, and many times, just gave up and zoned out to a phone puzzle. That is my choice way to numb reality. It is much more effective than alcohol. I don’t know how much I’d have to drink to achieve the same state of forgetting all my sadness, but I know it would make me sick. Is it just me?

So nature wasn’t magic. It has helped me de-stress and process work trauma a hundred different times in my life, but apparently, it doesn’t fix being a widowed single mom of a 4 year old. The book The 3-Day Effect, will not make my list of recommended reading. It just didn’t really get to the point.

ANOTHER TYPE OF SURRENDER

So when you are just in despair at the end of your rope, the options are very few. You can hold on with all your might, or let go. I was way too tired to keep holding on, so thing by thing, I let it fall into God’s hands. It wasn’t ‘a super spiritual, loving, all is wonderful and so we give it over to you because we know you will just take great care of it,’ type of surrender. It was ‘an angry, broken, everything is ruined, God you can have it because I’m walking away, and then we will all see that you really don’t care,’ type of surrender.

For those of you who know God personally, I’m sure you know the next part of this story. God does take care of his children. It’s been tiny little things that I wouldn’t have seen if I wasn’t watching.

But the end of your rope, isn’t the type of crisis that is solved in a minute, a day, a week, or a post. This is a journey. I’m still in the valley. I’m still learning to turn things over to God, and only slowly doing it with hope.

This is a hard season. These are hard days. We climb a few steps out and slide right back down. The triggers this time have been sneaky, understandable, but also blindsiding; like when the A/C goes out and one of times you were most impressed with your late husband was when it went out last time and he was able to use contacts he had developed on his own and figure out how to fix it himself for free. The losses are never ending. So the mercies have to be new every morning.