Interrupted Life…

How many times have you actually seen a break happen in your everyday life? A matrix like response where you lean back parallel with your knees and you are balancing your life suspended with just a plane of activity that causes you to question the gravity and it’s power to sustain you mid air. You are holding on to nothing yet you are momentarily suspended in time.  Your senses are so acute to what is around you, in fact, you are convinced that you might die from the experience.  Such is my life when a huge interruption entered into the cadence of life of which I was keeping rhythm.

My life has been nothing but one big series of Interruptions of the unexpected.  Some of you know this feeling.  You have maybe been there experiencing an interrupted life when you watched your family break apart.  I was a very young girl when I experienced an immediate change at a very young age of 5.  It was so very hard to witness my family being separated and placed in county services. Orphans. The life interrupted seemed to be crushing but yet God’s ways are not our ways and we were able to be placed in a nurturing home full of  genuine caring parents. Adoption.

Then it was a just as suddenly, a interruption that brought an amazing person in my life that showed how one could be loved beyond imagination. Coming from a product of the county services, foster care and abandonment of the biological parents, it was a blessing. To be loved by an adoptive family and then to find a soulmate who has stood beside me all these years, it is truly a blessing that God’s ways are not my ways.

How do you find your way through the life of interruptions when the one that hits you late in life stops you in your tracks.   I am not sure how to do this because my heart is breaking and my life has forever been interrupted.  Changed.  I know that after 8 months I am still no better at understanding this pain that has suspended my world with nothing to push forward with…  no gravity can hold my broken heart from shattering. It is beyond reasoning that a parent should say goodbye to their 36 year old son. No one can imagine this interruption.  I am one who bounces back from the unimaginable, who pushes through to find a new normal, who cries out to God to turn back time and give us a second chance to have one more connection.

My sweet friend is going through a life interruption and my heart hurts for her. She is trying to make sense of it all and yet push through the necessary steps that continue to advance her forward. My sister in law is experiencing yet another life interrupted by cancer. She has been incredible in her journey yet it seems as if the life interrupted has left her suspended between gravity holding her to keep her from falling. Each of these women are incredibly strong and bring me such encouragement to not stop pushing forward. I can’t understand why life interruptions happen, but I am absolutely sure of one thing… it doesn’t have to define me, add an unwanted label or change my identity.  I will survive even though there are days I don’t want to.  I will be victorious even though I suspect that the goal in life is not to win but to live everyday as if it were my last.

Life interrupted isn’t just a phase it is a life changing event. It could be a broken marriage, an unborn child taken to early, a crushed dream or a lost job. Maybe it is a child with special needs, or a catastrophic event that takes loved ones away from you forever. I can’t imagine how Jonah lived a life interrupted. All that he was, had and loved was gone at some point in his life. Then God hemmed him in and blessed his life. God surround me with a hedge of protection for my broken heart.