Marriage

The 2016 Rundown

| Marie Griffith

I look forward to 2017 with even greater anticipation than I did 2016. And 2016 didn’t disappoint. It was a wonderful year of growth and I did a lot of new things. In one of my January posts, titled Rising, I reflected on the amazing things I saw because I made a change and decided to do something new.

Some of the “first evers” for me in 2016:

  • Ate the Paleo Diet for 12 weeks
  • Ran an 8K in May
  • Ran the Spartan Race in Nashville in August
  • Ran a 10K in October

I chose to take on these physical challenges and have learned from all of them. Mostly I learned the importance of training and doing it with others. There’s something special about being part of a group working together toward a tough common goal. I wrote about it in my post Together.

There were more new things for my family in 2016. In February we moved from our home of 13 years into my newly renovated childhood home. Our home is beautiful but there were some adjustments for us. We are no longer in a rural area and it interfered with my morning runs. I lost my running groove…..or so I thought. I just had to embrace the new and wrote about it in Embrace the New.

Throughout the year I continued issuing my Live Like it Matters Challenges but I wrote more than ever about my childhood and the legacy my parents left. Living in my childhood home has brought a flood of memories and it’s been a wonderful gift of healing, new perspective and renewed gratefulness. Some of those posts are Memory, Groundwork, Quitting, and Mama.

We went on our annual trip to the beach with many of our favorite people. It’s a special place and does our hearts good to be there. I highlighted it in my post This Place.

My son moving to Texas last year for a job, then moving to Colorado this year provided a lot of inspiration. His courage to take bold steps into the unknown is fascinating. We visited him in October and it was one of the best trips ever. I wrote several posts as a result of the trip: Possibility and Shine are two of them.

I was finally able to put into words some of the difficulties of 2013, 2014 and part of 2015. I’d start the posts, then stop. Try to start again, but no words. They just wouldn’t come. More times than not, something is worked out within me when I write and I knew I needed to write about these things. At last something broke inside of me and the words came for the first post called Linger. It took months for the other healing posts to happen but I found the words. I’ve received more comments on those posts than others because everyone has experienced loss, grief and heaviness. Those posts are called Gone and The Dark .

We had a great holiday season. We gathered with family and friends several times. On Thanksgiving I ran my 2nd Turkey Trot and significantly improved my time. Our son came home the first week of December so we celebrated Christmas with the extended family early. Christmas gets more and more special with each passing year.

God is good and 2016 has been full of blessings. But what God did within my own heart in 2016 is the most momentous. He has given me a clearer view of what’s important. I want to love extravagantly because that’s the way He loves me.

Now I will let Him teach me how to do it.

All-Time Favorites

Quitting

| Marie Griffith

The sound of the doorbell startled me. When I opened the door the man asked for Wayne. Before I answered him, the man asked if I knew him. He had a familiar smile but his face was aged and different. And the voice……..the voice was familiar too. For the next few seconds my brain tried to match a name with the kind face and his recognizable voice.

Before I could make the match he told me who he was. I was glad to see him and especially happy that he came by to see Daddy.

Daddy would have been thrilled for the visit. The man was shocked and saddened to hear that Wayne, my dad, had passed away. After he gave his condolences, we caught up.

It was a strange mixture of emotions…….remembering what was, learning what is, and trying to summarize thirty years of life in thirty minutes or so.

Then he asked the most amazing question. “Did your dad ever stop drinking?”

Oh how I wish he’d have known the man that Dad had become. The gracious man that cared for Mom so tenderly while working his job from his home office. The man that overflowed with generosity…….with his time and resources. The man that forgave so easily because he knew he’d been forgiven so much.

Daddy stopped drinking in 1990 or so. Never took another drink.

He quit to save his life.

His quitting saved our lives.

And who knows what else his quitting did. Whatever it did, it was good and right.

But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace to me was not without effect. No, I worked harder than all of them—yet not I, but the grace of God that was with me.          

                            1 Corinthians 15:10

Names

Attention

| Marie Griffith

Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.      Simone Weil

Today  – give someone your undivided attention.

Put down your phone. Step away from the computer. Turn off the TV……turn down the music.

Look them in the eyes and listen to each word said. Fully.

Converse.

Seek to understand.

Connect.

Learn their hearts.

Love your people.

Live Like it Matters.

 

Immerse

Pace

| Marie Griffith

After my awful run last Saturday I was truly discouraged. Instead of staying in that gloomy state I went back out there on Monday and ran my longest distance to date.

And I felt great!

The problem on Saturday was that I was trying to run at a faster pace. I was trying to push myself at a pace that my body couldn’t handle. It made all the difference on Monday when I ran at my regular pace. I just ran. One foot in front of the other…….my pace at my best.

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Photo from greatist.com

I make the same mistake with my schedule. Some weeknights are filled with meetings and appointments and classes. Those happen and are needed, but I’ve learned that I need open spaces in my calendar. I need evenings at home with no plan, no agenda…..just time at home with my family.

When I crowd my calendar with too much I become stressed out, irritable, overtired and if I go that way for too long, eventually I’ll become non-productive. I rush around from one place to the next without noticing the people around me. Missing opportunities.

NOT living like it matters.

I function best at a certain pace.

Not her pace. Not his pace. But my pace.

When I try to do life at a faster pace, I don’t take the time to say hello to the stranger behind me at Target. I won’t ask the single young mom at church if she needs help getting her three pre-schoolers to the car. I’ll ignore the waiter’s small talk. And my family’s needs are the first to go unmet.

When I’m going at a faster pace, I’ll get the task done. The meetings and appointments behind me. Items checked off the list.

But my creativity is stifled. Compassion is eclipsed by drivenness. And my relationships suffer.

There are fast paced seasons. We all have those. But we can’t keep the fast pace for long. It’s not good for me or you or the people around us.

So I am learning to go at my pace. Even better……God’s pace.

Because my pace matters. Yours does too.

Live like it matters.

We’ve finally figured it out. Our lives get in step with God and all others by letting him set the pace, not by proudly or anxiously trying to run the parade.     Romans 3:28 (MSG)

Quicken

See it Through

| Marie Griffith

In the mid 90s I watched my dad learn a total new way of doing his work. The company he worked for did what most companies did at that time and upgraded the way of doing things to computers and software and transmitting data through the Internet. He’d always used his mechanical pencils, triangular ruler, other items I never knew the names of and his calculator to get the numbers. And he was good at it too. Dad was just fine with his old school ways of estimating.  img_4352

But the bulky computer came anyway. It sat on a hand-built shelf atop Dad’s drafting table. He built the shelf after he accepted the new way.

But it took a while. A long while.

This computer stuff and the email and the downloading files and working out the glitches frustrated my dad. A lot. He thought he was too old to learn the new ways. He thought about quitting. He wanted to give up.

But he didn’t. He stuck with it even when he couldn’t see how it would ever work. And he had that job until the day he died. That job enabled him to work from his home office for years while he cared for Mom. The frustrating technology and new way of doing things that Dad resisted so much at first was the exact blessing he needed later.

Dad stayed the course. He persevered. He stuck it out.

My parents were “see it through” kind of people.

My dad beat his addiction to alcohol. That doesn’t happen if you give up.

Mom stayed with Dad through a lot of painful years of marriage. Fifty-one years don’t happen unless you see it through.

Thank God I have some of that grit too.

Have you hit hard times? Don’t know how you’re going to make it through another day?

Want to give up, give in or quit the whole thing?

See it through my weary friend!  See it through!

“But we do not belong to those who shrink back and are destroyed, but to those who have faith and are saved.”      Hebrews 10:39  NIV 

The Dark

| Marie Griffith

Seven months after Daddy died, so did Mom.

Dad’s sickness then death was sudden but Mom had been ready for a while. Mom was tired of fighting for breath and she wanted to die. She wasn’t scared of dying, only of suffocating.

We surrounded her as she lay on her bed at home when she ran out of breath. And that’s what it was like. No gasping. No struggling. No fear. Her breathing slowed…..a gradual peaceful stilling of her chest……….then her breath was no more.

Mom was gone. Mom and Dad were gone.

We sat in the same room at the same funeral home with the same young funeral director as we had 7 months earlier and I thought about how nothing was how I thought it would be.

Nothing.

But I thought about it as if I was looking on, separated from all of it somehow. Everything was muted……..kind of dulled………what I heard, what I said, what I saw, what I felt.

In between the deaths of my parents my marriage took another hit. We had been struggling for a while. It was already so fragile and I was really scared this time. A real kind of scared.

Maybe that was the last time I’d felt anything full-strength. Maybe a part of my heart shut down. Maybe the Zoloft was doing what it was supposed to do.

As I sat there with my sisters around that table choosing the hymns to be played at Mom’s funeral service I remembered comments Mom and Dad made. Some of them to me. Some to others about me.image

Mom and Dad had noticed my fading. My distance. I wasn’t myself and they were worried. I told them over and over that I was fine. I think I thought I was fine. I think I thought everything would be fine. But they saw what I couldn’t see.

The thing about fading is that it happens slowly. So slowly you don’t feel it or see it. It goes unnoticed at first. Then the heaviness gets heavier. The darkness gets a little darker. And you get used to walking around in the dark.

And I kept doing what I knew to do. What I had to do. Because the world doesn’t stop when your marriage is crumbling or when your Dad gets sick and when you just need time to think about things and feel things and mourn things. The world doesn’t stop.

Then it was heavier and darker and I was tired. The kind of tired that goes into my bones. I woke up ready for each day to be over.

As we reviewed the order of the funeral service, the words of one of the hymns came to mind:

O Lord, my God, when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy Hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed

Then sings my soul, My Saviour, God, to Thee
How great thou art, How great thou art
Then sings my soul, My Saviour, God, to Thee
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

 

And I wanted my soul to sing again. I wanted to wonder again at all that God has made.

I’d not lost all hope. There was still some in there.

Because I knew……I know that abundant life is truly possible even in the darkest of places.

How great you are God, my Savior God to Thee, How great you are!

 

In response to the Daily Post’s Faded.

 

 

 

 

 

13 Years Here

| Marie Griffith

The renovations on the inside of my childhood home are complete. The guys we hired to do the hard stuff have done a fantastic job and it’s beautiful.

Tomorrow we’ll begin to move our life from one place to another. I’ve already moved some of the small stuff. Boxes of old pictures, books, and wall hangings are there at the new house.

But the old house still holds most of our things. And memories. Lots of memories……13 years worth. It’s been a good place to us. Lots of good times have happened here. We imagehave the best neighbors in the world and the most beautiful country roads you’ve ever seen. The people here are hard working people. The kind that stop to talk to you when you’re walking on the country roads. They’ve heard we’re moving….so they stop and ask about it.

I’ll miss that. The community I’ve felt here. I’ll miss Mr. Billy and his wife, Brenda, stopping by in the fall and blowing the horn for me to come out of the house to see if I want to buy 25 lbs of sweet potatoes or some collard greens. We always visit awhile and I look at pictures of his sweet great grandchildren.

I’ll miss Mr. Jimmy. His 30 plus acres are right beside our place. He let the kids stomp and romp all over that land. They fished in his ponds, climbed on his hay bales, rode his horses, borrowed anything from his barn (as long as they put it back), and built forts there, too. They’ve long since outgrown all that but they will remember imageit forever.

I’ll miss our Christmases here. Our live tree took up almost the whole living room but it was okay because it was Christmas. And we barely had room to open the gifts when extra family was here.

I’ll miss the walks on my country road. The quiet and beauty. The cotton growing, the horses neighing, and the cows grazing.  The sound in the summer of the crickets and frogs and cicadas. The pecan trees and blackberry bushes.

We’ve grown in this place. Not just older, but better. Along with the good, there’ve been hard times here, too. We’ve laughed and cried here. We’ve been healed here and loved here.

It’s all been so good to us.

I’m so thankful for the years in our little home in the country.

In response to the Daily Post’s Neighbors

The Last Time

| Marie Griffith

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None of us knew this would be the last time Mom and Dad were together.

Mom had been sick for years and Dad her sole caretaker for the last two. He was still working his full-time job out of his home office when he started feeling abnormally tired in the spring of 2014.

Mom hadn’t been out of the house for months…..except for an emergency room visit the month before. But she mustered up enough energy to go to the hospital to see Dad. He was in the intensive care unit. The visit from Mom was a surprise to Dad and the oxygen mask couldn’t hide the big smile on his face when he saw Mom.

They reached for each other and held each other’s hands. They told each other “I love you” and stared at each other. Squeezed and patted each others’ hands.

Those of us in the room felt the sacredness of the moment. I think they knew this was the last time.

The last time they’d hold hands. The last “I love you”. The last time they’d see each other.

In response to The Daily Post’s weekly photo challenge: “Connected.” and One Love.

You can read more of Mom’s and Dad’s story here.

21

| Marie Griffith

Last year I wrote about my 20th wedding anniversary. We almost didn’t make it to 20, but here I am a year later and here we are still making it.

Twenty-one years ago in the mountains of Tennessee I said “I do.”

August 12, 1994
August 12, 1994

I could never have known what I was saying I would do. Almost three years in and two kids out we separated. We agreed we needed a few weeks to think. But young love wasn’t enough to cover the hurt we had caused each other so after being separated almost two years we divorced.

Our two little ones kept us connected though. After three years of being apart, he invited me to dinner one night and we were married again three months later. On the same date as our original wedding – August 12th.

We both thought the worst was behind us. We moved to Texas to build a new life and before we celebrated our second 1 year wedding anniversary we had our third child. Things were really good. We enjoyed living in Texas for a couple of years but after a company layoff we moved back to our hometown.

The hard times came really hard. The most devastating of all came over two years ago. It almost destroyed us. Other trials came too. The kind not uncommon to others. The kind that comes with managing a household with 2 full-time jobs, raising 3 kids, and caring for aging parents. All of this while trying to stay connected.

The hard times hit but they didn’t beat us. We chose to stay.

We are choosing to stay.

We choose to stay because we love each other and we love each other because we choose to stay. It’s hard work. It’s painful and awkward and tiring. God has made what we thought was impossible – done. We have experienced the freedom of giving and receiving forgiveness.

God changed our hearts. He is still changing our hearts.

Both times I said “I do” I didn’t give much thought to our 21st anniversary. It seemed so far away. I don’t think I would have expected it to be this way.

But here we are fighting for our marriage, for our family. After twenty-one years we are learning to trust. We are learning how to love each other and we are getting better at it. I’m thankful that we are giving each other the chance to grow.

We wished each other a happy anniversary this morning. We kissed each other when I left for work. He has to work tonight so we will put off our anniversary dinner. Maybe we’ll go to dinner this weekend. Hopefully.

If not, we’ll have a really good conversation anyway. That’s something else we’re learning to do. We listen better now. We love each other more.

We’re getting better and better at this.

Be kind and loving to each other, and forgive each other just as God forgave you in Christ.

Ephesians 4:32 NCV