Sacredly Scarred

“This journey you and Ryan are on is so exquisitely intimate.”

– Whitney, my sister, and lifelong friend.

August 24, 2002, I was handed over in marriage to Ryan Kidwell.  I asked him not long ago, “If you knew then what we know now, and the pain that we would suffer and the trials we would undergo, would you have chosen me?”  He cleverly responded, “everyday over and over, despite the suffering, I would chose you.”  I realize that our cheesy bantering between one another allows us an opportunity to share some of our deepest hurts in a lighthearted manner and yet declare our deep faithfulness to one another.  16 years ago today, we exchanged our vows; little did we know that the oath we declared before one another would become so alive and put into practice at year 15…

“I promise to love God and allow Him to guide our life as one. I will find comfort in your love alone, for it is through Christ that our love will be made complete.

I will care for you daily, touch you tenderly,  and love you always.  Through times of joy and times of heartache, I will seek the knowledge and understanding of our Savior.

I will always share my heart with you, for on this day, I give you myself completely.  I will be your servant, humble yet confident, placing you before me.

For as long as we shall live, you are my beloved and I am yours.  I promise to never let love and faithfulness leave me; I will bind them around my neck and inscribe them on the tablets of my heart.(Proverbs 3:3)”

Our young 20 something selves discussed all the significant premarital questions; But, “how will we continue to dance through life if one of our children dies?” was never on that list of important questions.  Grief can be a battling within one’s soul.  It seems to take the very essence of reality and shift us into a world where we either feel weightless or so weighted we can’t move.  It can hit without warning or arrive just as one anticipates.  I have found it to be both comforting and debilitating.  We have not experienced what professionals deem as the “stages of grief.”  I find that term in and of itself misleading.  I believe C.S. Lewis might have described it best..

“Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer.  I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.” – A Grief Observed

Our life as one has now been sacredly scarred with sorrow.  I find sorrow to include mourning and grief.  Mourning occurs early as we would often sit together and weep; or allow one another to disengage  from “real life duties” and either cry in solitude (me) or perform manual labor (Ryan).  We placed no time restraints on one another, no matter how odd our mourning might have appeared.  I watched Ryan just days after Tyler died mulch flower beds that became a “significant” and “required” task.  Did they need to be done? No.  Did Ryan want to spend his time, energy, and mind focused on a task such as this? Yes.  And that is all that really matters in these moments of mourning.  I imagine if I would have given him a hard time and told him how silly it was to be mulching, it would have been the same as if he would have walked in on me looking at pictures of Tyler and said, “that’s not helping anything.”

It can be a sticky road to walk alone, but trying to do it together…this is when we both understood why the divorce rate is so high amongst couples who have buried a child.  It is easy to misinterpret sorrow.  It’s harder to communicate why grief hits when it does and might leave one of you in the bedroom while the other is tending to the needs and demands of the other kids.  The distancing that can occur between one another can leave you feeling as though you might lose that very person that you thought you could always depend on.  When you close out your spouse to your grieving heart, whether you know it or not, you are screaming at them that you no longer trust them.

We were bound and determined to be different.  We have rested on the firm foundation of The Rock of Ages for 15 years and this storm was not going to cause either of us to drown.  Some days the water was high and wading was not even an option.  This is typically when the other that might have been only waist deep was able to keep the both of us afloat.  We learned with excessive communication and a healthy dose of grace and mercy each day, our sorrow became bittersweet and pulled us into a deeper understanding of one another as well as our Savior.  Often times this might would include intentional time set aside to ask the hard questions, “are you desiring to pull away and disengage?  how can I help you get through the next day or just the next few minutes?  will you just hold me while I cry?”

That last question, being held…Ryan, found himself in a war zone, as he described.  As the mourning stage passed, he recalled for me, “It felt as though I was on the battlefield and tending to the wounds of everyone around me, only to finally realize that when I held up my blood stained hands,  I too was severly wounded.”  He had taken the lead of our family, as is his God given role, but had done so with no thought to himself.  A true selfless act of sacrifice, only he wasn’t Jesus.  He was not going to be able to sustain the momentum in this war zone and continue fighting as he had.  It was time for him to cease.  Only ceasing, to a man who takes pride in protecting his family, might be the hardest thing to accomplish.  His journey of surrendering in sorrow had just begun.  Mine too for that fact.

Why do I even share these intimate details with you? Because at some point you will endure hardship, you are enduring hardship, or you have endured hardship and if it effects your heart, it always involves your spouse. When you find yourself living with grief, no one tells you what to do or how to help one another through it. I can share what has worked for us. I can tell you that selflessness has become an aide in understanding one another’s sorrow.  I can tell you to pick up the Word of God and read.  I can tell you to sit in silence for as long as it takes and weep over the suffering you are enduring. I can tell you that singing songs of praise and worship hand in hand is beyond healing. I can tell you to talk out loud, face to face about the thoughts that run through your head. I can tell you that guilt has no room inside a marriage, and if you are feeling it, express it. I can tell you that when you feel bogged down and they feel like they are on cloud nine that you never allow resentment into your heart, and you praise God for the relief that they are experiencing. I can tell you that Jesus was a man of many sorrows and He understands our hurt. I also know that once you get out of the water and you are sitting in the boat together that the rush of relief is sweet and a return of the raging water sinking the boat again is inevitable and often times overwhelming…but when you are anchored in the hope of Christ, no storm is too big for Him to calm. I know that when one or both of us are so exhausted by grief and everything in us seems to be gone that we trust a God who never grows weary.

“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The Lord is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom. He gives strength to the weary and increases the power of the weak.”
‭‭Isaiah‬ ‭40:28-29‬ ‭

I also know that my marriage was strong before Tyler, but now, it’s powerful. God has a way of doing that with people who faithfully endure the struggles that hit them in this world.

There is a newer country song out there and one of the verses says this:

“Real men love Jesus
They don’t believe in leavin’
When the goin’ gets tough
They just keep on keepin’”

It’s what the the selected saints who suffer do. From Noah to Abraham, Joseph to Moses, Joshua to David, Paul to Timothy, John to Ryan Kidwell.

“… the God of second chance will pick them up and he’ll let them dance, through a world that is not kind. And all this time, they’re sharing with the one that holds them up when they come undone, beneath the storm, beneath the sun.  And once again, here you stand, your day has come.”                     -Bebo Norman, A Page is Turned