Safe

Freshly bathed, with clean pajamas and new socks, he curled up in my lap as we listened to his papa and my husband read about Moses' journey up Mount Sinai. "Is he going to get the Ten Commandments?" he interrupted. "Good thinking, Cohen," my husband said.

He smiled at his papa, swallowed up in that affirmation, and as I wrapped my arms around him, I felt an overwhelming sense of the Lord's pleasure, the Lord's provision, the Lord's kindness to our family. That these two beautiful boys would be ours, that we would be a family, and that he has sustained us over the past seven years, but most especially this last year.

It has been one week shy of a year since our pastor, my husband's boss, our friend suddenly and unexpectedly stopped being our pastor, my husband's boss, and our friend. These things were not our choice, but his, and it was more painful and traumatic than I've been able to put into words, even in a year of thinking and writing and processing.

It was a summer much like this one, with two active and energetic boys who wanted to swim and read and go to the $1 movies every week. We were doing Vacation Bible School and having playdates and spending time as a family, and then, on a Wednesday, everything stopped. More accurately, the world around us didn't stop, but the world from my perspective did. Suddenly everything was up in the air. Would my husband still have a job? Would the church survive this? Would we survive this?

And then the insomnia. Sleeplessness and zombification that nothing would fix.

"Those... months were like being dragged drunk through some malign carnival where the people on the rides were really screaming, the people lost in the mirror maze were really lost, and the denizens of Freak Alley looked at you with false smiles on their lips and terror in their eyes. Ralph began to see these things by the middle of May, and as June set in, he began to understand that the pitchmen along the medical midway had only quack remedies to sell, and the cheery quickstep of the calliope could no longer quite hide the fact that the tune spilling out oft the loudspeakers was 'The Funeral March.' It was a carnival, all right; the carnival of lost souls." - Stephen King, Insomnia

Even now, every night when I go to bed there is just a pinprick of a thought, Will I be able to sleep tonight? I have been able to sleep fine for the past several months, even without the aid of any kind of medicine, but the fear is always there. I can rationally tell myself that circumstances are different, that I am under the care of our family physician, that everything is alright now. But those thoughts are hard to focus on at 11 p.m. at night when fatigue starts to hit but my eyes stay open.

We are on the verge of moving into a new place in life, a new job for Christian, a new year of school for the boys, and I am feeling paralyzed. What will it be like? Will anxiety sneak its way in as we open the door to change? Can I be myself in a new place, when we suffered such trauma in the past as a result of others' opinions and disapproval?

I don't have a good conclusion to this chapter of our lives. I don't think that all the pages have even been turned. But how thankful I am for the small, whispering voice that says, The story is written, and I know how it will end, and when all is said and done, you will be safe.