Grateful

It's been five weeks since my runaway train told me to never speak to him again (read about that here.) Maybe I'm counting on purpose, or may it's just that it happened on a Monday, so I remember every Monday. But, really, whenever someone goes through a loss, whether it's losing someone to death or just dumb immaturity, they count things. First it's days. Then it's weeks. Then it's months. Then years.

No matter how long ago the loss was, we can give you numbers. We never fully forget and we never really stop counting.

But eventually there comes a day when the incessant urge to count and recount and relive and replay slow down enough to remind you of what life was like before the loss. I don't know that you ever feel normal after losing something or someone, but grace is being able to feel sort of like yourself again. A slightly modified version, but with enough familiarity that you can manage it.

I'm happy to report that today I'm grateful. I stood in my kitchen on Thursday morning before work crying and asking God if there would ever come a day when I just felt like Robin again and He heard me and gave me today.

A few things helped. First, I have a friend who is living through something similar and struggling too. We texted a lot this weekend and that helped. It's good to not feel alone. Misery loves company. And remarkably, company makes you stop thinking only about yourself and think about someone else too.

Second, my cat Midge turns 5 this week. Most of the time I try to avoid anything that makes me out to be a cat lady, but Midge turning 5 is enough to propel me head on, wholeheartedly, and without abandon into cat lady-hood.

See, I got Midge when she was 10 weeks old. She was a rescue kitten and the runt of her litter. Her back legs are slightly deformed and she had a bad respiratory infection. Her sibling kitties weren't letting her nurse so she was the tiniest, sickest, saddest little cat you've ever seen. Her owner was hoarding something like 25 cats when she got busted. Midge was taken to a vet specialty clinic to try and save her pathetic little life.

She looked like this:

The vets didn't think she had much of a shot, but they didn't want her to die in a kennel. So my roommate at the time brought her home to die in my house. But the thing is, you don't come to my house to die. You come to my house when you want to live.

Midge beat the odds. She's the weirdest cat you'll ever meet, but she's so scared of most people that you'll probably never meet her because she'll be hiding the whole time you're at my house. She hops around like a rabbit and because of her respiratory problems early in life, she sounds like she's dying when really she's just purring. I'm grateful that she lived and that I get to be her owner.

Here's how she looks today:

Finally, I'm grateful because I'm going to Haiti on Friday. This may be the strangest thing of everything I've mentioned to be grateful for, but I am. I've wanted to go to Haiti for a long time. I've prayed for Haiti, I've sent money to Haiti, I've sent other people to Haiti, but I've never gone myself and now I get to.

I'm scared about going to Haiti too, so it would be great if you prayed for me. I'm scared of how much my heart could possibly break from being there and I'm scared of what that could mean for the rest of my life. I'm scared of trying to get through the airport by myself, I'm scared of what Haiti is going to smell like, and I'm always scared when I have the great responsibility of caring for a team of people while in another country.

But fear and anxiety have a way of reminding me how big God is and that's something to be grateful for too.

How to run better

This week marks the five month anniversary of my ankle injury. You know - the one where I spent a week in Peru repairing a house back in October and instead of getting hurt there, waited until I was getting off the shuttle back at the Denver Airport to fall and badly sprain it.

I'd never really been injured before that. I've never had stitches, never broken a bone, never spent any time in a hospital for anything. I've lived a charmed life. But I learned a thing or two from being injured for a few months - first, that injuries take forever to heal and second, the best time to break through your comfort zone is right after you've recovered from an injury.

Two things to know - I hate being still and I'm not very patient. It's probably undiagnosed adult ADD. I have the attention span of a kitten most of the time, and am about as still as one too.

Speaking of kittens, this is funny. Watch it.

See what I mean? ADD.

Anyway, I was supposed to wear a brace for 6-8 weeks after I sprained my ankle. I wore mine for 3 weeks and 4 days. Close enough. For someone who can't sit or stand still for more than 10 minutes at a time, there was nothing more frustrating than not being able to move without pain week after week after week.

I'm not particularly athletic, meaning you would never be able to tell by looking at me that I love working out but I do. I love to run, swim, bike (sometimes I put them all together and even do a triathlon), walk, hike, and eat ice cream. The ice cream is what motivates me to do the other things. So having a sprained ankle for months meant no running, no swimming, no hiking, no walking, etc. That left me with biking (my least favorite of my favorite physical activities) and eating ice cream.

I wanted to be healed way faster than my body was willing to be. I remember getting on an elliptical six weeks after the injury and lasting for 30 seconds before having to switch to a stationary bike. Lame. Literally. Then another four weeks after that trying to lightly jog and gasping in pain after a minute and then being barely able to even walk 20 minutes on a treadmill. I really thought I was never going to be ok again.

But four weeks ago, four months after the injury, I tried again. And this time, my foot felt stronger and ready. The rest of my body had some catching up to do - it turns out, eating ice cream is not the same as running when it comes to building physical endurance. My body had no idea that it ever knew how to run and was shocked when I tried to make it do so again.

The beautiful thing, though, about starting over is that it gives you a chance to really start over. I had been in the same place with my running for years. The same pace, the same distance, the same amount of time I could go before I thought I was going to die. But now in starting over, after just four weeks of getting back into it, I'm forcing myself to go faster and farther than I did before. And you know what? I'm surprising mysef in the process. Because my body forgot that it ever knew how to run in the first place, I can now teach it to run better. Whatever psychological barriers I had leading up to my injury aren't factoring in now that I'm working from a clean slate.

So I can look back on last fall, being sidelined and forced to be still for a season, and be grateful for it now because, in the end, it's making me better at what I love to do.

It's also been four weeks now since my heart was broken. Again, I'm discovering that this takes longer to heal than I want it to. I've tried taking some tentative steps forward a couple of times over the last few weeks only to discover that it's way too painful still, and probably will be for awhile. That's ok. I've learned from my ankle that injuries aren't the end of the world and healing does come with time. And I'm hopeful that in a few months, I'll be able to really start over for real with my heart too, and push it out of its normal comfort zone and teach it how to be better. It will be shocked when I try to make it feel something again, I'm sure, but by then, it will be more of the heart I want it to be.

In the meantime, there's always ice cream. And maybe I should get a kitten.