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Thanks for visiting my diary. I've been journaling since 1984 and have chosen to share some of my entries online. They are not all positive thoughts, but I hope that reading them might be a blessing to someone who needs encouragement.
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Please also visit my music page, where you can hear samples from my debut CD, I Believe, which features songs written based on experiences shared in this journal.
I struggle with the concept of leaving things in God's hands a lot. I used to be much better about it than I am now. It's easy to say a few words, to "claim victory," but it's much harder to believe in it and to completely trust God in that way. I will probably write more on this topic eventually. I had planned to do it this morning but am struggling and am just very out of energy.
I had a dream about Vicki. I dreamed that she called me. I was still living in TX in the dream. She said she hadn't been dead but had allowed people to be told that so that she could spend time thinking and fix her situation. The phone call was cut short somehow. Then I moved here. I kept thinking, "She can find me. My number is listed." But I also kept feeling like I had lost her again. She was alive and I didn't know where she was. In the dream, I eventually called her jerk of a husband. He didn't know where she was, but I left my number with him and satisfied myself thinking if she wanted to find me, someone knew how.
Well, this was just one of those dreams that was too realish to be comfortable. I had to remind myself that yes, she did die. I'm not going to get a phone call. I'm not going to call M because for one thing she's gone, for another I couldn't find him if I wanted to, and for a third I'm terrified of him. Hmmmm... As I'm writing this my mind is feeding me the phone number. I am not believing this! A phone number from seven years ago.
I really thought I had given up this crazy thinking a long time ago. There was a time when I thought maybe he was just playing a cruel game with me. After all, he didn't tell her own family when the funeral was until it was too late for them to get there. So maybe there was no funeral. Maybe he was just keeping her hidden away, and maybe somehow she got out and she'd get on line and send me email. But I could never hide away in that denial. I talked to the cops. They told me it was a suicide. It's not likely cops would play his game. I thought I sorted through this a long time ago and went on with life. No, there was no closure, but I thought I had gotten to the point of realizing that some things just have no closure and that life must go on. All her other friends did. One of them even told me in an email that it was time to let her go and go on with life. I guess that's why losing touch with the two close friends was so hard. They both let me go on and on, even though I'm sure it drove them nuts.
Mom came in to see if I was awake, and I was crying. I have to give it to her this time. She tried really hard to be mom to me. She listened to me for the first time without making comments about my friends having problems. She listened to the dream and immediately recognized it meant no closure. She offered to go to the library with me and try to look up stuff from the papers and even write for the death certificate if that's public information. She even listened to some of my griping about how God could let this go on.
Of course, she had nothing to say that I haven't been saying to myself for all this time. And, of course, none of it was comforting. But she tried, and she didn't push me to get up and go to church or do stuff with the family. They were having some big family dinner today with Mom's cousins. She asked if I thought it would help me to get out and said that she felt bad that a lot of times when they can get me out I'm sick or something. But she didn't insist on it. She's dealing with her own stuff, though, which actually probably was to my benefit. Her mother died on Easter Sunday in 1992. The shared grief and even celebration was a really neat family experience, but it's still a loss even though it was expected and peaceful.
Actually, that year, 1992, was the first and only year Easter has meant something personal to me, something more than buying a new dress or baskets of candy or special services at church. Part of it, a big part of it, was that my grandmother was so ready to meet Jesus and actually had hoped it would be on Easter. We didn't think she would live that long. He, of course, hears the smallest prayers, and that one was no exception. So that made Easter very personally meaningful for my family.
But the rest of it was that Vicki was the first real, up close and personal, adult big sis friend I ever had, and such a huge aspect of that friendship was what I learned about God from her. I learned to have total confidence in Him. I learned to understand what I had spent my whole life reading about. When a friend who trusted Him so completely committed suicide, it just through a huge blanket over that light that was starting to shine in my life.
For a little while I held on, supported by a couple of people's friendship and encouragements, but eventually those too were gone, and at the same time I was hurt very deeply by some people in my local church. For a while I kept trying to reach out and find a place for myself in another local church, but I was always held at arm's length. Eventually, I just quit trying.
I must have been holding onto something. I made it this far. But it's hard for me to see that. And it's very hard for me to trust a God who promises good and lets these things happen, especially if people who commit suicide don't get to go to heaven. How could He do that? How can He accept that kind of a dent in His plans like it doesn't matter? This whole suicide and free will thing is a major struggle for me to accept or understand or even just trust Him on. There's a song that was sung at my cousin's funeral in 1994 called "Trust His Heart". Mom reminded me of it this morning. Of course, it made me cry. Not so much for the fact that it opened more grief, but because I don't know how to trust His heart. I'm obviously not seeing it clearly--and who understands His heart anyway? But to me none of this makes sense. If He wanted us all to be with Him, wouldn't He have arranged for it?
Oh, silly, of course He arranged for it! Yes, I know this, and I am now feeling like a silly brat of a child throwing a temper tantrum because things aren't working out the way I want them to. But really, all I want to know is that beyond a shadow of a doubt, my sis is with our Daddy and that when I get there I can stand beside her and everything will be all right.
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