Fear of Falling...

Remember in January when I said 2018 was going to be my year of being brave?

One week ago today, being brave was climbing a rather rickety ladder up 25 feet in the air and flipping around on a trapeze as if I had the slightest notion what I was doing.

The old Joy would probably not have tried. She definitely would not have actually succeeded in doing a backflip off on the bar. Why is that?

Certainly part of it is that I am in better shape than the old me-that cannot be denied. But also I have become a tad bit fearless. As I climbed that ladder I told myself that even if I fell down and made an idiot of myself, what did it matter? I would have tried. I would have proved to myself that I am willing to take a risk. That’s a tricky thing for me, trusting that risks won’t always end in hurt. Or that even if they do, I won’t break from said hurt.

Two weeks I got to hear Lysa TerKurst speak (because of this sometimes amazing thing called the internet). Lysa is the most profound speaker and teacher that I have simply stumbled upon on my own journey through this maddening grief and rebirth cycle I’ve been on. I’ve mentioned the First 5 app that I use for my devotions a couple of different times-Lysa is the head of Proverbs 31 ministries, of which First 5 is a part. Lysa’s teachings reach some part of my soul that is aching to understand my faith in the context of loss.

Her teaching, the one that I was listening to as I was washing my hair two weeks ago, her teaching was about continuing in the face of disappointment. I listened as she weaved a tale of theological teachings and grand ideas about faith and sin and ultimate redemption, and then she got to the bit where she tied this into her own story of loss and disappointment. Her story of her husband’s betrayal, and of what that sort of disappointment does to your soul, and how on earth you take that and move on and change somehow for the better.

Sometimes I feel so ridiculous for how hard my divorce was on my heart. In reality, my divorce was a healthy and necessary part of my life. I don’t go into all of the bits and pieces of the bad in my marriage. But rest assured, I do know, somewhere, in the back of my mind, I’m this new and different person, physically and emotionally and even somewhat spiritually, because…because. How many different ways can I teach myself that I’m a better person for letting go of this notion that holding onto something that was causing me nothing but hurt and pain and misery in the end was a brilliant idea?

I’m none too sure. But flipping around on a trapeze bar, being told by the instructor that I’m flying so well-somehow that’s a piece of it. My sister and my brother-in-law at one point said to me, “This is the new Joy.” And I know that seems silly-I know that my family in no way at all blames me for ending my marriage-but it’s like, it means the world to me that they have my back. That they have embraced all of these changes, even the ones that probably seem a little crazy and somewhat vain.

Spending an entire week in a fifteen passenger van with your entire family can get a little hairy. You’re cramped, you only have certain snack foods, and, if you are me, you only have a little bit of data on your phone that you have to hoard for uploading pictures. Tensions run high. It can be especially easy for me to feel like a kid, the only one on the trip without a spouse, without someone else to act like my crazy is somehow divorced and different from the rest of my family’s crazy. I drive everyone a bit batty because I can’t quite help myself from talking so much and so loudly.

But on a trapeze in the middle of absolutely nowhere, Massachusetts, I flipped and flew and served as some sort of metaphor for figuring out life 3 years after a bomb detonated and tore life all to bits.

Maybe there is no real difference between flying and falling.