We Still Win...

Here I sit. In my car with the passenger side window busted out and glass all over the passenger seat with the AC blasting and my baby asleep in the backseat.  I don't even care that I'm wasting gas sitting in a running car even though wasting gas means more money out of my pocket. I just don't care...

This afternoon, just as I got Greysen down for his afternoon nap, a neighbor of mine comes banging on my door to tell me my car has been broken into. I hadn't even been home an hour. Thankfully they didn't steal anything. Well...nothing but my morale that is...

I can't even say that I'm surprised. I wasn't surprised in the least. It's just another thing. Another thing designed to break our stride (as if we've had much of a stride in the last few months...it's more of a limp than a stride these days...). Remember when I said in my last post that everything wonderful that has happened in our lives in the last 6 1/2 months has been simultaneously punctuated by something annoying/devastating/sad/demoralizing/etc.?  Well it's true. And now with these final few months upon us, the spiritual warfare is stronger than ever...

Have you ever read Screwtape Letters?  Or This Present Darkness?  If you haven't, I would encourage you to. Both are about the simultaneous existence of good and evil. Whether or not you believe there are spiritual beings among us (angels or demons or spirits or whatever), there is no denying, at least in my life, that darkness, like a dirty moth to a flickering flame, is drawn to Light. A sort of "where there's smoke there's fire" kind of thing. Why do bad things happen to people who love the Lord?  Well my humble opinion is that evil is constantly rooting for Glory to fail. And so it pulls out all the stops to either squelch the Joy altogether or at least diminish it substantially by any means possible...

Getting accepted to medical school?  BAM. Your mom has stage 4 ovarian cancer. Getting ready to have a baby? BAM. Jonathan and Matilda get in a rollover car accident. Getting ready to graduate medical school?  BAM. Your mom dies, your confidence in your testing abilities is shot, and now your car is vandalized. Ugh!  We Womacks just can't catch a break...

However, in everything so far, we have still praised God along the way. We have 

clung to Him, we have given Him the glory, and we have refused to let any counter forces diminish our joy in the receiving of blessings. Now is no different...

But can I just say, for a moment, how freaking sick and tired I am of this push and pull nonsense?  I am just SO over it with this crap. I love my Jesus, but I let the four letter words FLY today. All with my baby on my hip. And I'm not even sorry about it!  God is stronger than this spiritual warfare. He will prevail. I know what happens in the end of our story.  I KNOW that we finish this thing out strong. And evil, if you're listening, you suck and you lose. Seems like a lot of wasted energy to fight a battle you've already lost! Come at me bruh. I dare you. I have the best spiritual armor there is!  Impenetrable. Unwavering. Indestructible. Invincible. And there is not a damn thing you can throw at me that will make me decide that Jesus is not better...

There is good and there is evil at play in our world all the time. I choose to side with the good guys. I choose joy. Even when that joy is laughter through tears while I sweep out the glass of the broken window on my hoopty car (cuz it was the only one we could afford).  I still win. We still win. We might look kind of haggard as we cross that finish line, but cross it we will. Black eyes, bloody noses, broken bones and all. And we will be whole when we do... 

He Conquers Who Endures

If you at all know my husband, you know that he is a hopeless perfectionist. That perfectionism, in some ways, has served him well in these last 5 years that he has been pursuing an MD. It has pushed him to reach goals that others could not achieve. It has inspired him to reach for his best when it seemed like what he was reaching for was unattainable.  Jonathan is a 33 year old second career medical student who is within months of becoming a doctor. He has far surpassed everything I have ever envisioned about this process. He makes me proud every single day. Medical school is not for the faint of heart. It is not for the weak of spirit. It is not for those who give up when the going gets tough. The only people who can say they are months away from obtaining an MD are those who got knocked off their horse a time or two and saddled back up again. For those who saw the impossible odds that they were up against and suited up anyway. For those who know that despite what the "statistics" say, they can rise above the norm. Jonathan is that man...

The determination in his voice that I heard in early January 2010 when he told me that he was supposed to be a doctor was such that I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the end result of this "impossible" endeavor was going to be victorious. He wants this. He has put forth the effort to achieve this. And now 6 1/2 years later, he DESERVES this...

How many impossibly difficult hurdles has he scaled in these 6 1/2 years while he was pursuing this?  Countless. Selling a home. Moving to two separate foreign countries. Holding me up while I struggled through infertility and tackling IVF with me perfectly in sync. Battling through life with epilepsy. Holding my hand as I gave birth to our son. Becoming a daddy and helping his son experience the world. Hearing the news of the passing of his beloved grandfather. Watching his mother be met head on with a life-changing diagnosis and holding her hand as she drew her last breaths. I could go on. Those are simply the ones many of you have known about...

If you only know Jonathan by name or through my anectdotes about him or if you met him for the first time today you would never guess that those experiences have punctuated his medical school career. You would never know that he's not your typical medical student. You would never know what he gave up to achieve this. You would never know how truly hard he's worked for this...

But, friends, my husband is so far beyond typical. My husband is several cuts above typical in so many ways. He possesses character, fortitude, and grace that is absent in most. He has persevered through some of life's most difficult "lemons" and he's about to toast it all with some pretty amazing lemonade.  I know I am wholly biased, but I don't care. Jonathan Womack is amazing and I am incredibly lucky that I'm the woman he chose to do life with...

So here we are...mere weeks away from the end of this chapter and the beginning of the next. You know when you read a great book and those final pages are so riveting and intense that you stay up until 3:00 AM turning pages just to see what happens next?  How the hero of the story isn't "out of the woods" yet, but you hope and pray that the victory you've envisioned for them is the reality you'll celebrate when you reach the end of the story?  That's where we are. One month from tomorrow we will submit those residency applications and that will be that. But in four weeks time, Jonathan will take two board exams, finish a sub-internship in Internal Medicine, and complete his applications. He is so incredibly apprehensive about the test he will take on Thursday. He has postponed this test now twice as life kept punching him in the face right before it was time to take it. The first test date he had was May 26th...Bernice left us on May 28th. Thank the lord he chose to postpone it!  

But here he is met with this seemingly impossible hurdle. His perfectionism now is holding him back. It's telling him that maybe this will be the thing that keeps him from becoming Dr. Jonathan Womack, MD. It's terrifying. No amount of communicating my encouragement and the faith I have in him is translating to him having confidence that he can do this. I know that he can. That he will. But life has dealt him a pretty awful sucker punch in the last 2 1/2 months and it's left him feeling like maybe all of this was for naught...

But he's suiting up anyway guys. He's pressing forward, both barrels loaded, and he's gonna do this thing. He takes this test in 4 days. He's stressed, exhausted, and mentally and emotionally drained. His practice test scores have left him feeling defeated. He feels the weight of the world on his shoulders. His perfectionism, this time, tells him that this test might beat him. I know it won't.  I am apprehensive too, but I know he will come out victorious...

Now is not the time that God says "Ha!  Sorry. You suck and you're done."  On the contrary I think this is when God says "Stand back. Let me show you what I've been doing."  I think now is when Jonathan grinds out these final days of studying, walks into that testing center, and his efforts align with God's ultimate plan. Now is when he defeats that giant even though he feels tiny in comparison...even though he only has a pebble to throw...even when victory requires that pebble to strike the most perfect spot with the most imperfect of methods.  Now is when God's power is made perfect in Jonathan's weakness...

So would you pray for him today?  Tomorrow?  Thursday?  Would you stop what you're doing and rally for him?  Would you be his army?  He needs it. Pray for strength, calm, endurance, perseverance, knowledge recall, CONFIDENCE. Pray that God grants him grace...that he receives what he's worked for...what he deserves. He can do this. He WILL do this...

"He conquers who endures. ~Persius"

I Will Not Let My Grief Speak Louder Than My Joy

So has it already been more than 3 months since we said goodbye to Bernice?  Seems at once like yesterday and also an eternity ago.  I have buried myself in busyness to try and keep out those creeping feelings of sadness, but try as I might, they still find their way in.  I am blessed with an incredible husband who not only lets me (and encourages me to) hash out how I'm feeling in that messy "stream of consciousness" sort of conversation style, but also allows himself to be vulnerable and hash out how he's feeling with me too.  It's a catharsis neither of us could live without.  I thought coming back out here to Baltimore, away from the places and people that Bernice and I shared...away from the house where she spent her final days, would help.  I thought not having to walk into that studio where she and I spent countless hours together only to feel that physical sting of the realization of her absence would mean less of that palpable grief.  I was oh so wrong!  I have found in these weeks that I've been back in Baltimore that her absence is even more heavy.  I have picked up the phone to call her or text her or send her pictures more times than I can count.  Nearly daily as a matter of fact.  And as the stress and anxiety rises around our house with all things board exam, residency, med school, counseling practicum, money, travel, etc., I find myself longing for my friend.  For my Bernice.  Her sweet spirit and calming nature could always talk me off my ledge.  When I felt overwhelmed, I could call her and she would artfully smooth my rigidity while simultaneously redirecting my attention. She could always put things in perspective.  She would remind me that I'm loved and important and talented and smart.  I'm not sure she was even aware that she could do those things...it was a subconscious super power of hers.  But then again, maybe she knew exactly what she was doing all along...

For the past 4 1/2 years, our lives have followed a pattern.  For every big, amazing moment in this journey, we have experienced an equally profound loss, disappointment, or painful blow to our morale right before.  I won't list them all out, but suffice to say that it has become such a predictable pattern, that we almost anticipate those sucker punches before they happen.  As a matter of fact, when Jonathan's Granddaddy passed away not even a month before we lost Bernice I said, "You know, as we get closer and closer to graduation and residency, we should probably be aware that there's a big probability that things will get much worse before they get better."  Weeks later we lost Bernice.  Weeks after that my friend Rachel lost her mom to pancreatic cancer and I found myself back in OKC wading through another tragic loss and trying desperately to hold my friend up in her loss as she had held me up in mine.  Dear Lord in Heaven I pray that is the last of it for now!  But I'm not naive enough to think there won't be more.  If I let my mind wander off into the possibilities of what could plague us next...it's a bit of a rabbit hole.  And not one I enjoy going down...

Now maybe this all seems doom and gloom.  Maybe you're thinking, "Rachel, sounds like you're depressed.  Sounds like you need some grief counseling."  And maybe I am...I probably do.  But I want to communicate that our anticipation of the BLESSINGS is just as heady as our anticipation of the bad things.  Probably more so.  I refuse to let the things that are depressing suck the joy out of the things that are AMAZING!  It's not fair that we should get this far in this whole thing and hit the finish line with our heads hanging in defeat.  And how mad Bernice would be if she thought her passing was the reason we didn't finish this race with confidence, joy, and pride!  How I wish I could share with her all of our plans.  How I wish I could call her and stumble through a conversation about the places we could find ourselves next summer.  How I wish she and I were still making plans for her and Charlie to come out in October to celebrate Jonathan's last day as a medical student and his first day as Dr. Womack!  But I won't let that sadness and that disappointment squelch the profound joy and pride that both of us deserve to experience in all of this.  She wouldn't want that.  And I sure don't want to disappoint her...

In the 67 days since she left us, I have made a point to allow myself to feel what I feel.  I have made a point to recognize when I'm feeling depressed or angry or guilty or lonely or irritable...to let those feelings slowly burn until I can put them aside...to keep from burying them only to have them well up in me again later.  I have tried to recognize that some of my odd reactions to things are just a product of my grief.  I've given myself grace.  Given Jonathan grace.  Tried (not always successfully) to give others grace in their own grief. Everyone walks this road in a different way and at different paces.  Finding the new normal in this time in our lives where NOTHING is normal is tough.  I have to navigate how I feel and find a way to manage those feelings in a healthy way.  I have to find someone else to call or text at those times when Bernice would be my number one gal.  I have to figure out how to function in a world she no longer exists in.  It's a process...an arduous one, but I'm piecing together my functionality day by day...

In 86 days, Jonathan will be Dr. Womack.  All the board exams will be done, all the applications will be in, everything we've worked for as a couple for 6 1/2 long years of our lives will be seen through to fruition.  It won't matter what crappy things have been hurled our way over those 6 1/2 years...we will be Dr. and Mrs. Jonathan Womack on October 28, 2016 and we couldn't be more excited.  So excuse us while we grapple for that joy that is ours for the taking.  While we gather all the happiness that we can amidst our grief.  While we put blinders on to block out the things that have the potential to diminish even a small part of that blissful feeling of success that we both so thoroughly deserve after all of this.  It's been a team effort.  And Jonathan and I both deserve to revel in the completion of our goals.  We've done it!  Hell AND high water have come, but in 86 days we will prove that we've been unshakeable in our perseverance.  I will not let my grief speak louder than my joy...