Trust.

I startled awake, inexplicably terrified. God, I said to the strange stillness, help me trust You. It didn't come. Trust as I've known it will never come again. Before, when I hadn't experienced crushing tragedy and life was more or less the way I wanted it, the way I planned it, trusting God somehow equated to nothing really bad happening to me. I would fulfill my part of the bargain, do the right things, say the right prayers. God would then do His part - send His angels to guard me and those I loved in all our ways. We wouldn't even strike our foot against a stone.

Now, in spite of all my right living, the prayers prayed and churches attended and Scriptures endlessly read, the worst has happened. There's no guarantee the worst won't happen again - if anything could be worse than this. I am face to face with the reality of evil and death despite all my trust. I am afraid. I am angry, and I am broken. What will He do to me next? How can He expect me to trust Him now?

The bedrock of my trust has been revealed. It wasn't so much God - His character and His promises - as it was my safety and security which I naturally chalked up to God taking care of me because I did all the right things to make Him happy. I've found that this God, the one I spent my life believing in, doesn't exist. There is no such thing as an obliging Genie in the sky who keeps his end of the deal I've imposed on him through my so-called righteous living. As Elisabeth Elliot said, if God were merely my accomplice in my pursuit of a safe, happy, fulfilling life, He has utterly betrayed me.

But the God who has called me to trust Him - to trust Him even now - is so much more. This world, and everyone in it, is all about Him: His story, His plans, His eternity. Either God is real or He isn't. If He is real, then everything He says about Himself is either true, or it is one lie after another.

I don't want to survive this. I don't want it as a part of my story. But I have been left here, and it is for a purpose. I cannot live one more day on this earth if God isn't here. I can't draw my next breath if He is a liar. So I repeat Steven Curtis Chapman's words to myself, over and over again. Sometimes it is a silent anthem in my head; other times I say it aloud, through clenched teeth:
 

I know Your heart is good

Your love is strong

Your plans for me are better than my own

And I will trust You.

All I can conclude about God in the aftermath of this devastation is that He is incomprehensible. He calls Himself good and loving, then does what feels like the opposite of good, the opposite of love. To trust Him now will never look the same as it once did. Naivety was obliterated that early morning on the freeway, and in the aftermath there is no such thing as blind faith. God's promises for good and not for evil are still the same as they always were. He has not changed. What has been completely rewritten is my definition of good. "Good" is not the things I wanted, planned and dreamed for myself. Good is God. God, somehow, even when all of my senses scream otherwise, is good. And in that goodness I pray that I will someday, with more surety and conviction than ever, relearn to trust.

Valentine's Day

February 14, 2006. I was seventeen when the smartly dressed, country music-loving, Ivy League-hopeful, tanned Southern boy with eyes like the sea walked in my front door that Valentine's Day. We struck up a conversation, discovered we had most things in common, and though I was in denial for months I fell hard. When we weren't talking in person (at church, youth group, birthday parties and gatherings), on MySpace or instant messaging (these were the pre-Facebook days), we spent countless hours on the phone (he helped me study for my driver's license, played devil's advocate for my debate and senior thesis prep, quizzed me in Spanish, probed my political views and stretched my intellect every which way). I spent long spring afternoons and hot summer nights walking laps around my neighborhood, swatting mosquitoes, laying on the driveway and sitting in the bed of my dad's pickup truck while we discussed every topic we could think of to avoid getting off the phone. The day he told me I was his "best friend in Maryland," I did a happy dance in the middle of the street. Neither of us breathed a word of romantic interest until he'd officially told my dad he "liked" me at a Starbucks late on the sticky June night that I graduated high school. I had no idea how he felt about me that spring, but I was a goner - hook, line and sinker.

Valentine's Day, aside from its usual romantic connotations, was always such a special day for us - commemorating that February night in 2006 at youth group listening to our leader talk about what God-centered romance looks like, me sitting on the floor with my best friend and trying not to think about the handsome newcomer on the couch right behind me. Through our dating and married years Nathan always found a way to make each Valentine's better than the last. Some years we celebrated with our best Texas friends, Eric and Katrina, with much feasting, decorations and serenades from the guys. Other years Nate got all the small group guys involved and they whipped up a romantic feast for us girls. Two years ago I bought 14 small presents and left one out for him to find every day of the "14 Days of Love" leading up to Valentine's Day. Then, when the rain ruined my planned picnic, I lit hundreds of tea lights and we picnicked on the living room floor.

On our last Valentine's Day together Nate surprised me with a stay at the JW Marriott in downtown Houston and a romantic dinner cruise.  After a fancy dinner watching the sunset drift by, he tipped the live guitarist to play "Then" by Brad Paisley. He led me to the dance floor and we danced, all alone in a sea of dining couples, to the lyrics he'd had inscribed on the scrapbook he gave me when he proposed: "We'll look back someday/ On this moment that we're in/ And I'll look at you and say/ And I thought I loved you then." It was one of the sweetest moments of my life and I cried.

If anyone had told 17-year-old me on the night I met Nathan that he could be mine for eight years, and that on our ninth Valentine's Day I would be the one bringing him flowers, laying them on a snowy patch of ground under a makeshift cross and his name on a funeral home picket, I wouldn't have changed a thing. That amorous arrow stabs at my heart this year, and will every February 14 for the rest of my life, but underlying the pain is a lifetime's worth of memories and the sweetest love I'll ever know. I love you, Nate. You are my everything.

Saying Goodbye

This morning I sat in a dental hygienist's chair, cleaning tools in my mouth, tears seeping from under the safety glasses, and I said goodbye to my husband.

In the weeks since Nathan went to heaven I have alternated between acceptance and denial. Sometimes reality is crystal clear: he is gone, and I have to learn to live without him. Other times - most of the time - I come across a picture of him in all his vibrant aliveness and my brain cannot wrap itself around the fact that he is no longer here. Nathan was taken from earth to heaven in a millisecond. I've been assured of that repeatedly. But I wasn't there. I (thankfully) didn't see it happen. I kissed him and waved goodbye as he left for work, and I never saw him again. My Nate, dressed in dark blue pants and a Carolina-blue work shirt with his name embroidered in red, drove away and honked his horn at me in farewell - a final farewell, as it turned out.

As grateful as I am for the ability to "remember him as he was," it makes his absence that much more unreal. My phone rings, and I expect it to be him. I drive down the highway, run errands, nurse Elissa in our bed, and all the time am just waiting to see him pop his head in the doorway or emerge from a crowd or appear around a bend in the road. I've visualized him coming back countless times. I dream that he was gone but now is back again. I know God could say the word and Nate would find himself back on this earth just as suddenly as he left it. And I want that more than I've ever wanted anything in my life. It is so wrong for him not to be here. So wrong to be constantly on the go between two houses, to have our entire life together packed away in boxes, to take our baby girl to the cemetery to visit Daddy when, for other kids, "visiting Daddy" means swinging by the office or cheering from the sidelines of a pickup soccer game.

Until last night, I hadn't made peace with the fact that Nate's time here on earth is finished. I wanted, hoped for, half expected him to come back again. The idea that he is never coming back was, and still is, inconceivable to me. I cannot begin to imagine living years, decades without him, and I don't want to. I hadn't said goodbye. I wasn't willing to relinquish my wishes to God's obviously different and higher purpose. In many ways I was caught between reality and wishful thinking - unable to grieve and heal well because of how hard I willed this not to be true.

Last night, as I unpacked some of our things and tried to squeeze four years of marriage into the bottom level of a townhouse, my eyes fell on one of Nate's Bibles. He had at least four, and this was not one he used very often. I picked it up, not expecting much, and noticed sticky tabs attached to two pages. The Bible fell open to the second tabbed page, and I couldn't breathe. In this barren, barely-used Bible one passage was highlighted several times, in blue and then in green:
 

"For I am already being poured out as a drink offering,

and the time of my departure has come. I have fought the

good fight. I have finished the race, I have kept the faith.

Henceforth there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness,

which the Lord, the righteous judge,

will award to me on that Day."

- 2 Tim. 4:6-8

Tears streamed down my face as I turned to the second tab. Attached to the story of Gideon in Judges was a sticky note in Nathan's handwriting. He had outlined a sermon he preached to our youth group one Sunday last year, and the words at the bottom took my breath away again. Nate had clearly printed these words:

"We have a race to run; Jesus has conquered death; God will be with you."

Over this past week I've been reading Mary Beth Chapman's Choosing to SEE, recounting the loss of their daughter Maria and the daily choices towards faith and hope they've had to make since. As I read the chapter where the family returned home after the accident and found a specific, healing message that Maria seemed to have left them, I prayed for such a message from Nathan. I was desperate to somehow communicate with him, but it feels like a thick dark veil has been drawn between us since his passing.

Last night that veil was lifted, if only for a moment, and it was as if he took my face in his hands, looked me deep in the eyes with that famous, reassuring smile of his, and gave me his message. It was loud, and chillingly clear. He fought his fight. He finished his race. He has received his crown and his reward. It is time to say goodbye, for now...