Honoring Your Husband

Part II

Post 6

**I wanted to delete some of this but just cannot as it is part of my story…

My first post about Honoring Your Husband was a brief synopsis of how I became the person I was before I became involved with Todd. My why I was who I was at that time. My own personal depiction of the person I had thought I wanted to be and the person God led me to be. But wait… just when you think God has you where you think He wants you things change again. I had become a stronger version of the person I ever dreamed I would be and in such a significantly different way. But I felt good about me… and my daughter. We were doing things ourselves. We tore walls out in our home, pulled carpet out and put in our own hardwood floors. We refinished the existing hardwood floors. We learned to use commercial sanders and belt sanders and circular saws and miter saw. We were doing “manwork”. She was excelling in college, never taking a break even for a summer. I was working night shift six straight twelves in a row and LOOKING FORWARD TO IT every single one! We were doing it. Life was moving along and we had not been left behind. We had made life good again.

Ahhhhh ha! Almost six years into our recovery and the rug is ripped out from under me again! He wasn’t done yet. I had more growing to do already. I lost my job at the medical center. There’s a great “mean girls” story there :)- for my best nurse friends who know, they know but for now I’ll leave that as this… there are TWO cbl’s you must complete in order not to get a “final written” immediately, not just ONE. What does that mean you say? You must go into the computer and click a button for “human” resources letting them know that even though you dispose properly seven hundred and seventy seven times a day blood born pathogens, you gotta click that button telling them you ACTUALLY do know how. If you don’t click that button… well, they can fire you. My first manager was kind enough and let me know that I was important enough to sit me down and educate me on such things as I was new to this corporate world. What I did not realize and my wonderfully kind manager had moved on to better places, was that there was actually another cbl that carried the same “weight”. I failed to click that button. Of course there is so much more to the story that details the end result but the end result does not change in that story either. I was fired. Apparently, I learned, that if all of us nurses who have nothing else to do in a day but click buttons is that “human” resources is watching the bottom line for the hospital and can lose tens of thousands of dollars if we don’t all click those buttons. Gosh darn, if I had only known maybe things would have been different. But as a very good friend of mine who may or may not have been my wonderful manager told me- “God was ready for you to go Julie and He knew you wouldn’t leave on your own”. I clung to that thought for years actually. This was a devastating blow for me. My passion. My therapy. My motivation. My REASON was gone. Oh, I grieved this loss as much as a death. I was crushed. Being that our hospital system had become a monopoly, I had zero opportunities locally to work in another Emergency Department. Six months pass during THIS particular grieving period. Finally I was ready to grab my boot straps and get back on the horse. Travel nursing. I got with a great company and off I went to a place in Laurinburg, North Carolina almost six hours away from my home and my daughter. Hard decision to make, but what choice did I have? We adjusted and life found a new direction… again.

Here’s where my life became something I would not recognize ever again. Todd Dean Ward. The “brother”, boring cattleman buddy of my father’s and brother, friend of the family, “Uncle Toddy” to my kids with whom my encounters were benign and friendly. He was a dearly loved friend who spent extraordinary amounts of time building some incredible memories with most of the afore mentioned people in my family. He had been through a few life changes himself for which my father always kept me abreast on while sitting across the kitchen table from him so very often. Toddy was his buddy. His treasured buddy. Something about the stars must have crossed one evening and for some reason, we saw one another in a different light. Skipping through the semantics of “courting” and our story, we became the best of friends and fell disgustingly in love. This was completely unexpected. He was never anyone I thought twice about nor was I to him. So here we are having found the most wonderful thing in God’s special bag of the richest of blessings.

He. Was the Man. The Man I had held in my heart for all of my life that would fulfill the places in my soul I had so longed for but believed did not exist. I found my match. My mate. I found the person who could LEAD me. I found the person who could bring God’s order to my life. He thought like a man. He treated people like a good man treats people. He loved his family as the head of the household should. He walked like a man, talked like a man and just existed… yep, as a man. He never overshadowed me but walked beside me with a fiercely protective arm around me. He respected me as his equal but never forgot his role to lead. He never went ahead of me and never fell behind either. He taught me how to follow HIS lead. He taught me that allowing the right man to lead was a natural thing. I have a lot of friends who are women’s rights advocates. I am not opposed. I had worked to establish myself to be able to walk in a “man’s world” and feel comfortable in my skin. I also knew how heavy the responsibility was in carrying the household by being a single mom. I saw how easily he managed it. As natural as it is for a woman to carry a child, it was natural for this man to carry a household… a family. He let me lead when I felt so inclined but the beauty I found was that I did not HAVE TO. He taught me that there was a peace and serenity in knowing HE was taking care of things and watching over us ALL even when we didn’t know he was looking. He taught me respect by giving it to me. He taught me trust by showing me how he treated others when they weren’t looking. He taught me honor simply by being himself. He taught me HOW to HONOR MY HUSBAND. Everything he did was effortless. His nature… was effortless. He truly was an anomaly. He was so simply extraordinary. How can one be both at the same time? Simple. Yet extraordinary. He required so little yet gave so much. He needed wranglers, a button down shirt- usually blue- boots and not much else. He enjoyed his Maker’s Mark, Copenhagen snuff, good friends and a damn good time wherever he went. How had I missed this spectacular human all of these years? Because it was not yet time. But I believe that God saw us and found a time for us to discover what He had in store for marriage all along. The idea of marriage was restored for me. My daughter had become confused at this person she now saw before her eyes. ” Who is this woman who fought so hard to teach her that her own two feet were the ones to stand on? Who is this woman who is now allowing herself to rely on … a man?” It was the most natural thing I could have ever imagined. This MUST have been what God meant. We were married and I am telling you the truth when I say that I woke every single day and thanked God above for this beautiful, incredible, most wonderful blessing.

How, now, could God take back what He had so generously given? How, now, could he rob us all of a human who would strive daily to find the good and do something for someone in His name? How? How could He? We are taught not to ask such questions. I believe that God is a good Father. I believe that he allows His children to have these thoughts in order to come back to Him to find the answers. We will not find the answers in this world though, will we. And here is anther gift God has given to us. Faith. He has placed the drop of faith into our souls for which we can come back to time and time again to nurture and grow. I suppose it would be easy to ignore it and let it wither and go away. What kind of life would we be left with if there was not faith? It is the ultimate test of humanity to believe and have… FAITH. I have found that perhaps it is a paradox to think that one’s faith should grow in such miseries of this world.I know that many times we as humans won’t hit our knees until we are forced upon them. It is easy to have faith when the sky is blue and the grass is green – the easy times when life doesn’t seem to need divine intervention. It is harder when we cannot understand and we cannot see. Not that I believe that faith should ever be taken for granted but for certain it seems that faith is most difficult to cling to when there is nothing else. I do not know much else at this time but this part I have learned. By honoring my husband I was then also honoring God. He led me to this place before he himself had to go. He did that FOR me. He did not leave me empty handed. He left me with more faith than before. A gift. An infinite, eternal gift that cannot be returned. Perhaps one of the best gifts of all.

I am working daily to find my way through this darkness. Most days I am lucky enough to find something that plants another seed in my heart to grow into something more than I am now. Some days I fall under the grief and see no way out. But then it happens. The sun will rise again and He has promised me another day to search for the seeds. There are ways in our lives each day that we can find to pursue the closeness to our Father. One that will stay with me for the rest of my life is to Honor My Husband. Even in his departure from this place, it is just as important if not more that I continue my honor to him. So even though our beloved’s have gone before us, we can feel their legacy and presence in the ways in which we honor them. I feel more vigilant and protective of that honor than ever these days. It brings me a great amount of peace in my heart to continue to give him that as actively and beyond that, as I did before. He lives on in the Honor I have for him. When we feel that we have nothing left, we do. Honoring them means continuing on what they gave when they were here. It does not mean that we aren’t honoring them when the tight grip of grief strangles us down and puts us in bed some days. It also does not mean that by NOT letting grief strangle us down we are NOT honoring them. Such a tricky dynamic. Again going back to the presumption that in some way carrying on with life is not fulfilling our obligation to the sorrow. This is a conception that many of us on this side struggle with- that if we try to pick up ourselves and put the pieces back together we are somehow leaving our someone behind. That if we remain in our sadness we are in some way paying homage to our lost one. Then there is the perpetual “They would want you to to be happy” and “They would want you to move on” spoken by well meaning people who want nothing more than to help heal us. My good friend, also recently widowed, and I share the same reaction to that- BULLSHIT. Perhaps it is true but it surely is not what WE want to hear or do. We want back what we have lost. But alas, it is all in pure love that we are encouraged in such ways.

So I shall leave you with this parting thought, pearl for your day. Life is nothing if it is not the ever changing essence of existence- of being. We are never meant to stop evolving. In the best of times and the worst of times we should open ourselves to self introspection. We cannot stop what is before us that is in God’s hands and not our own. But we can make the choices to move ourselves more into His presence so that when the good times are good we can feel Him and when the bad times are bad… We can feel Him even more. Honoring My Husband brought me so much closer to God that I still reap the rewards of having had him here, if only for a while. But with that honor and short time we were allowed, I look forward to our heavenly union in which this place will become only a shadow of God’s greatness. There is more waiting for us. Todd never wavered from that and did his best to instill it everywhere he went. If I am to honor him, I am to also believe that he did not just lead me in this life but will lead me into our eternal one.

God Bless you in your grief my friends. God’s peace be with you. And God’s grace upon those of you who have shown up to carry it with us. Thank you.