This one made me mad when I first read it. “That’s dumb. That’s just a dumb sign. What choice did I have?”
We think that God speaks to us in subtleties that we miss if we don’t pay attention. But I don’t think that is true. I think He is pretty obvious. (At least He seems to be for me, probably because He knows how oblivious or obstinate I can be.) Because I drive by this sign what seems like 500 times a week, I knew that He wanted me to write about it… Okay, okay, okay… fine.
Writing something gives us a legacy, it contributes to something that survives long after we do. Emily Dickenson, one of the most famous poets of all time was pretty much unknown during her life. It was only because her sister had the forethought to not destroy the papers stuffed under her bed that her talent was discovered after her death. She never knew during her lifetime what an effect on people and literature that she would have.
My story hasn’t felt like my own this year. It is often said that God is not the author of chaos. And to be honest, I could attribute about every bad outcome that I have faced in my life up until this past year with some screw up on my end. So very often, I wrote my own story—and in turn, my own consequences and thus, my own chaos. Obviously, the death of other people that I also loved dearly was devastating and out of my control as well, but those didn’t alter my entire life path like this did. My dad’s death was shocking, heartbreaking, and I still miss him every day 27 years later, but I know that though there is a void in my life because he is gone, my pathway for life would probably be fairly similar if he were here. It would just have him in it.
My pathway and everything that I hoped the rest of my life would be has changed since we all lost Vince. Everything. When you get married, even later in life, all of your dreams and hopes mesh and interweave themselves together… we were going to do this, we were going to do that, we would see this together, we would hopefully be grandparents together, we would experience this stage of life, I would be there for him in this, and he would be there for me in that.
To be the author is in a sense, to be in control. So, when I read this sign, I thought—how could I have authored this? How could I have controlled it even if I wanted to? And then I realized that even though I couldn’t have authored the event itself, I could author the rest of my story. That is my free choice. That is the choice that He is giving me. I could lay in the fetal position in my bed and refuse to go to work or function at all, or I could outstretch my arms and say to God—"I can’t. I can’t do this without you, I don’t know the middle, the arc, or the ending. I am going to mess it up. Please, please write the rest of the story. I have nothing left within me to move forward without you showing me what to do.”
And that is where I am. I am in the midst of that process of surrender. But He still reminds me that He is the author and that chaos is not. One example is this house where I am living. Moving here was such a blessing to me overall, but it was also really, really hard to do. A huge part of me wanted to stay right where I was in Jasper and keep his hat, his keys, his shoes, his coat, and everything else exactly where he left it. When I was having his house in Alpharetta remodeled for my move, I was having one particularly awful day. A thousand doubts were rushing through my mind, and I constantly questioned whether I was making the right decision—whether I was doing what Vince would have wanted me to do. I went over to the house to meet the remodeler to see the progress. He was building a pantry out of the old master closet making it so that the space would open to the kitchen instead of the living room. I turned the corner into the master bedroom and stopped in my tracks. There was a board exposed from under the paneling and drywall that wouldn’t have been exposed unless that one change was being made to the closet—and there it was. Vince had signed his name on that one exposed board. His parents and I figured out that when they had remodeled that house themselves as a family when they moved from next door before the kids started high school, that Vince, probably bored as he waited to do something, had scrawled out his name on that board. And of all the boards that they added when they added a new living room and master closet changing the old living room to a master bedroom, that one board that only God could have known that I would see in the worst phase of my life, was the one that Vince had written his name on. Vince was about 13 when he wrote his name on that board. He wrote it more than 34 years before we got married and 37 years before he died.
So in that case, Vince was the writer, but God was still the author.
