I Don't, But I Do

"The cool thing about God, and also the annoying thing about God, is that when he wants to move, he tears down the whole operation, lumbering giant style. Even when he tiptoes, the whole ground shakes." -Erin Loechner

Question: How, in the past, have I embraced ambiguity? (Hint: We do this daily.) What did it teach you? How can I apply this lesson?

Embracing the unknown is not my style. I like to know. I want to know. I want to see, then I can move forward with my head high. The unknowns taunt me. With scattered pieces of interests, hopes, dreams, and maybes I keep my head down because most of the time is feels like they are pulling me apart instead of coming together. The unknowns. 

Death is not an unknown, it is a fact, but its presence before the living comes and goes with the wind; unknown to the world, people, families, a person. It just comes and then it leaves behind shattered innocence and ashes of reality. 

I have lost many things and people through irresponsibility, selfishness, and fear. Death is the first thing that brought me loss, which I had nothing to do with. I did not cause it, wish it, want it, or think it would come. I lost my Nana, to the unknown ways of God’s timing and the repercussions of smoking with a dash of cancer. Death is known, but the “when” is completely unknown. Yet even in knowing we do not expect it to come. I know, but I don’t want to know, but I really want to know. A cycle of poison.

I live a post loss life. A life that is the reality of the repercussions of grief and believing that pain is valid and if not looked after could lead back to death, even if it is just the death of hope and dreams. I say this often and I used to say it with complete discontentment, but here I am today nowhere even close to the place I thought I would be when I was nineteen and high on my dreams, my hopes, myself. Another known, pride comes before the fall. 

Unknown, what does the fall look like, because it looks different on every person.  Known, my fall looked like eggs being scrambled, a clear picture of what was all whirled and broken down into a bowl full of ooze that everyone says is still a beautiful life, despite the missing piece. But yet even if over scrambled, the eggs always rise.

It is a beautiful life. Took time, but it is beautiful and uncomfortable, but not a bad life. Beauty can rise from the ashes. Still it is those unknowns…the uncomfortable beautiful pieces that have floated back into my life; the hopes, the dreams, the desires; no amount of heart change makes how those pieces come together known to me.

What is known to me has taught me that the unknowns can produce everything from the highs to the deepest lows. But the worst unknowns are the ones that I am generally unwilling to face, to let bloom into knowns, because they can bloom, grow, and reach towards the sun, just as they can wither and fall to the ground. I do not know when life blooms and when it dies, I just know it will and does.  There are truths in life that I will never understand, because I am not in a position in my humanity to ever truly grasp them. That is why I can find peace, because I am known, by the one who knows it all and reveals to me what I am meant to know. The ability to rise, fall, bloom, wither, live, and die.

So to the unknowns that are the puzzle pieces of my days, I do not know what you will become, but I know you will. A permission to keep going in the loss of a person, a dream, an ideal. An invitation to embrace ashes and the ability for them to bloom into new life. The ambiguous life is filled with pieces all over the table, some fit together and some have not yet been placed, some get taken away, but trusting that the picture will be whole, because the picture is known. I can live. 

- Hannah