Can't Make This Stuff Up!

by Susannah B. Lewis

  One day recently, I was particularly angry at Jason over something extremely petty. (I’d like to say I don’t remember what it was, but I do. It involved a pair of boxer shorts lying on the floor precisely 1.2 centimeters from the hamper.) After stewing over it for nearly an hour, I made a choice. I made the choice not to have a full-blown come-apart and yell until our children and small animals scurried for cover. Instead, I fixed Jason lunch and took it to him on our back patio. I did not want to fix a sandwich for my beloved, and I even contemplated spitting in his Miracle Whip, but I fixed it anyway. And, listen y’all, he was so appreciative of the gesture. A little apprehensive at first, yes, but appreciative.

  That was sacrificial love on my part, all right? Because I sacrificed a whole lot of pride making that ham and cheese sandwich for him after he had the audacity to leave his boxer shorts lying so close to the hamper.

  I remember thinking, as he chomped on potato chips, I love this man. Am I really going to ruin the entire day by arguing with him over boxer shorts lying 1.2 centimeters from the hamper? Really? They were so close. I mean, why didn’t he just pick them up—no, Susannah. You aren’t going to argue with him about this today.

  Years ago, I would have doused the boxer shorts in gasoline, set them on fire, and tossed them onto his lap.

  Though many things, like Jason’s lack of knowledge when loading the dishwasher, still infuriate me, and sometimes I have that vision of the cast-iron skillet coming into contact with his cranium, I rebuke that thought in the name of Jesus and we work through our issues. Why? Because God brought us together and God alone keeps us together. We are dedicated to praying for each other and for our marriage.

  And, praise Almighty, I’ve taken the divorce lawyer off the speed dial.

  A few years ago, I stood at the living room window and through tear-soaked eyes, I watched Jason bury my sixteen-year-old dog in the backyard. I saw him pause from shoveling dirt on Peaches’s grave to wipe his damp face. My husband, the tough man that he is, was broken at my heartbreak. I knew right then that although he’s going to make mistakes and I’m going to make mistakes, I have a good man who loves me, and that’s something worth hanging on to.

  We’ve weathered many storms by now. Jason is the one who prayed over me when my miscarriage was confirmed and I couldn’t get out of bed for days. He’s the one who celebrates my achievements and calls me out on my mistakes. He’s the one who laughs when I laugh and holds me when I cry.

  This is agape love. This is love at its ultimate. This is a love that sacrifices pride and self-interest. This is the love God has for us, which led Him to sacrifice His Son for our sins. This is the love Jesus possessed in order to obey His Father and sacrifice Himself. This is a love of supreme greatness.

  You see, the Bible says the Enemy seeks to kill, steal, and destroy (John 10:10). And marriage is no exception. The Devil loathes agape love. He loathes the support and encouragement found in holy matrimony. He will get into our heads and lie to us about our spouses and our circumstances. He will tell us our husbands are awful because they aren’t as romantic as the actor in some cheesy Hallmark movie. He will deceive us into believing we deserve better or everything is our husband’s fault. He will refuse to let us see our own wrongs and instead prompt us to lash out at our spouses. This is why it is so important to be in the Word, have knowledge of the Holy Spirit, pray the full armor of God over our marriages, and invite Jesus to be at the center of them. Because Satan will do whatever he can to destroy what God has brought together.

  Many times, marriages end because people fail to understand love is an action and not a feeling. It took me a long time to grasp that nugget from the Lord, but I’m so glad I finally did. That giddy “butterflies in my stomach” feeling I had when we danced to Prince so many years ago (which could have been the cheap champagne) isn’t present every day, but this doesn’t mean I don’t love my husband. When will people realize feelings are fickle and fleeting, and love isn’t intended to be that way?

  Love is deliberate.

  Love is on purpose.

  It is also patient. It is kind. It does not envy. It does not boast. It is not rude or self-seeking. It is not easily angered and does not keep record of wrongs. And nowhere in 1 Corinthians 13 does it state love is a warm, fuzzy feeling.

  When Jesus said in John 14:15, “If you love me, keep my commands,” He was saying that loving Him is a deliberate action—not an emotional feeling. To love Jesus as He commanded, a conscious choice must be made to show love as described in 1 Corinthians 13, because Lord knows being patient, kind, and hopeful doesn’t come naturally. It is a choice. We are expected to show love to our spouses always, even when we don’t feel like it.

  I’m talking to you, ladies, who have good men but are just bored with them or frustrated because they don’t have the slightest clue how to use the vacuum or they don’t write you poems or send flowers on random Thursdays, and you start to wonder if there is someone better out there. Listen, spouses aren’t like cars. You can’t just trade them in when you’re sick of looking at their dashboards.

  When the Lord brings two people together as one, it is beautiful and sacred and worth fighting for. Let us guard our hearts. Let us guard our marriages. Let us keep God at the core of our relationship and show love even when our husbands leave boxer shorts lying 1.2 centimeters from the hamper.

  And if we seek first that precious, flawless agape love—love that truly sacrifices, forgives, and believes (the love of Christ, freely given to those who ask and receive)—only then will we truly be able to love our spouses and withstand whatever comes our way.

  CHAPTER 5

  Bloom Where You’re Planted

  Sometimes I dream about the cracks in the sidewalk. The ones in my childhood hometown like the cavernous pit on Key Corner that always grabbed the front wheel of my skate and sent me plummeting to the hot asphalt. I’d get up, blood dripping down my leg, and continue my journey to the Exxon for a grape Slush Puppie on a hot summer afternoon.

  Brownsville, Tennessee, is a small Southern speck on a map with population: not enough. The place where I spent my childhood. The place where my parents and grandparents spent their childhoods.

  My great-grandmother, Bess Brown, once told me the town was named after our family. We’d founded the whole tiny place, “in all its boring glory,” she said. She was 101 years old at the time and couldn’t distinguish a car from a Coke can, but I believed her in my childish naïveté. I pedaled my hot pink Huffy bicycle through the neighborhood thinking, This town is mine.

  My maternal granddaddy, Hilliard, owned the corner drugstore years before I was born, before emphysema riddled his body. I’ve seen pictures of the store, though, and how it looked like a place right out of Mayberry. My mama kept a few of the big glass bottles that had once contained Coke and grape syrup, and as a little girl, I’d stare at them and think about the old days in black and white when having a soda at a counter was a real “hoot.” I remember the sound of the big trucks roaring by Hilliard and my grandmother Lucy’s one-story Victorian cottage built in 1873. Those trucks shook the tall window panes and drowned out the sound of Hee-Haw on her rabbit-eared television.

  My paternal grandmother, Rebecca Brown, was a favorite teller at the big bank with the indoor waterfall. She always gave me a handful of suckers when we visited, and then she strutted me around to show me off to all her friends. She made a bigger deal about me than necessary. I hadn’t scored a single point in the church basketball game the prior night, but she made me out to be the next Wilt Chamberlain in pigtails and jelly shoes. I spent summers carving graffiti (boys’ names surrounded by hearts) on the back of her and my granddaddy Billy’s shed. It was the same shed where my dad held band practice back in the sixties. Their claim to fame was wearing high-water pants and winning a talent show. I heard they could play “Gloria” like Van Morrison himself.

  I remember the ugly red carpet in our church. It covered the altar where people wept and repent
ed as a fat Southern preacher shouted about hell and damnation and wiped sweat from his brow. That bleeding red carpet soaked in the sounds of my mother, the pianist, banging out “When We All Get to Heaven” on the cherry baby grand.

  When my granddaddy Billy died, I remember standing in the drafty funeral home and noticing my daddy slipping down the hallway. My mother motioned for me to follow him. I’ll never forget finding him in a dark back room crowded with folding chairs and a dusty organ, and he was sitting on the floor weeping like a baby. That was the first time I’d ever seen my father cry.

  My hometown. Where I heard names like Miss Fannie, Emma Tanna (Tanner pronounced “Tanna”), Mr. Parker, and I knew immediately who they were and every name that rested on the branches of their family tree. We all knew one another. I never went to a gas station, a diner, or a Peach Festival without my grandparents talking with ladies wearing too much blush or men with walking sticks about how so-and-so’s boy just wasn’t right after the war.

  It was the little place where I could roam from one end of town to the other on some set of wheels and never worry about kidnappers or scary guys in conversion vans. The place where I raced down a hill on a grocery cart and spilled onto Main Street and almost got hit by a Mack truck. I ran back into the grocery store to find my mama, my short life still flashing before my eyes. That store. I’ve memorized each aisle in that store. I can still see the big bell shaped like a cow that sat at the meat counter. “How may we serve moo?”

  That town was the place where I ate too many ice cream cones and thick-cut bologna sandwiches. The place where I learned piano from a woman with the oldest, but prettiest, hands I’d ever seen—covered in wrinkles and spots, but nails always freshly painted peach. Her house smelled like old-lady powder, and I read my sheet music by the antique lamp on her upright.

  That town was the old familiar place where we had family reunions in little cabins littered with sawdust on Tabernacle Road. Where the grown-ups drank iced tea and situated box fans to help ease the sweltering summer heat. Where the kids played hide-and-seek in a graveyard and I was too fat to hide behind the skinny tombstones.

  But after I graduated high school, my mother and I packed our things and left. She left the town that had produced fifty years of memories for her. Granted, we only moved thirty miles from that small Southern speck on the map, but my father was dead, I had graduated school, and we felt it was time to leave. It was time to start new chapters in both our lives. It was time to live in a town that had a Target.

  I went to college and majored in English and met a boy and we danced to Prince. We got married and had babies. You know that already, but guess where we ended up? A hop and a skip from his hometown. Not mine, but his.

  We go to the diner after church, and the children and I are halfway done with our meals before Jason’s taken the first bite. He’s off gabbing with an old man with a yellow beard who took him fishing once when he was five. Jason had a crush on his granddaughter in elementary school. And he’ll often try to explain to me who so-and-so is. “You know, she got married in high school. Her daddy was a dentist. You know her! She grew up on the four-lane!”

  No, dear, I don’t know who that is. Her father didn’t fill my cavities.

  Sometimes I look at the older women sitting on the church pew in front of me and imagine their backstories. I didn’t grow up seeing their sweet faces or hearing my grandmother pray for their ailments. Those ladies aren’t a part of my history. And then I get to thinking about my hometown again and how I knew everyone and always said a prayer for Mrs. Dora’s migraines, and I mourn that a little. I don’t necessarily want to live in Brownsville, Tennessee, again, but I cannot forget my childhood or the place where I was raised. And I miss thinking, although it was never necessarily true, This town is mine.

  Please don’t misunderstand. I love the town where I currently live. I have made many new friends and been blessed by numerous people here in my husband’s neck of the woods, but sometimes as they discuss something unfamiliar that happened around here years ago, I realize this isn’t really my town. Oh, I love this town. I really do love this town. But it isn’t mine.

  However, this is my children’s hometown. Like the sidewalk cracks I so fondly remember, my daughter will someday dream of the wooded trails at the back of our property. My boy will remember the ball field where he would rather dig his cleats in the dirt than tag a kid on second. They’ll remember their teachers, their mud pies, their bugs in Mason jars, their youth here in this small Southern speck on a map.

  Every childhood trip to the corner grocery store, every time we pass the lumberyard and see old man Davis sweeping sawdust, every time we peer at the massive oak trees when we are at the stop sign on Park Street, we file that away, don’t we? Isn’t it funny how we can be lying in the bed one night, thinking about the wet towels that are still in the washing machine, and suddenly a vision of our eleventh-grade English teacher resurfaces? Wasn’t she just precious (most of the time)? And how did she get her tight curls so blue?

  Those memories define us in some way. Especially if we spent our childhoods in one place, whether it was a small community or a large, bustling city, we become one with that location on the map. The people, the stories, the sidewalks, the little old lady at church with the migraines—those things are all pieces to our innermost puzzle.

  But often we are forced to leave the place that houses so many of our puzzle’s pieces. This is because God moves us. He sends us. He transplants us.

  Being transplanted can be intimidating. Letting go of the past to embrace a new beginning can seem downright impossible.

  “Who am I if I’m not living in the cypress house on Thomas Street? Who am I if Stella doesn’t do my hair? Who am I if I will never hug Mrs. Melba again? Who am I if I don’t buy my vehicles from Mr. Kelso? Who am I if I never take a walk down this road again?” Those questions can leave us feeling a little out of place.

  That’s exactly how I felt when I left my hometown.

  But I’ve learned I’m never in the wrong place to serve God.

  Second Corinthians 2:14 says, “Thanks be to God who . . . through us diffuses the fragrance of His knowledge in every place” (NKJV).

  You see that?

  Every place.

  Not just on Main Street in Your Hometown, USA.

  Every place.

  And God doesn’t just do new “geographic” things. He doesn’t just physically move us. He loves restoring and restarting and refreshing and renewing our lives. He loves to do a new thing within us.

  Isaiah 43:18–19 reads, “Remember not the former things, nor consider the things of old. Behold, I am doing a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert” (ESV).

  The Israelites were slaves and had lost everything, not to mention they were wondering when in the world God’s promise would come to be. But they were instructed to forget the former things and see the new things God was doing. Like the dead leaves turning green again in spring, a new thing was springing forth. A rebirth was coming.

  Physically moving from my hometown hasn’t been the only new beginning in my life. When my mother passed away, I certainly didn’t think of it as a new beginning. No, it seemed like the end. It was the end of our late-night talks and our laughter by the pool. No more of her homemade Mississippi mud cake on my birthday or Alfred Hitchcock marathons on her couch. My mother was gone from this temporary world and so many beautiful and precious things were finished. I thought my joy had come to an end too.

  But I now recognize that her passing was, indeed, a new beginning. For her, it was the beginning of her eternal life in paradise resting at Christ’s feet. And for me, it was time for God to do a new thing in my life even though it seemed painful and weird and foreign. It was time for me to learn to depend solely on Him instead of my mother. It was time for me to embrace His comfort, find my joy, and press on. It was time for me to grow in Him. And once I ex
perienced His goodness through my grief, it was time to be on fire to spread His message of hope and encouragement.

  Philippians 3:13–14 says, “Brothers, I do not consider that I have made it my own. But one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (ESV).

  Think of Paul writing those encouraging words from a bleak prison cell! A prison cell. And yet he continued to press on. Paul continued to follow God’s call. He strove to forget the past. He kept his head up and his hope alive. And if Paul can do it (from a prison cell), we can too.

  Maybe you didn’t ask for a new beginning. Maybe you’re struggling with the loss of a loved one or the loss of a relationship or job. Maybe you’ve left the town where so many memories reside. Or maybe you can’t embrace your new beginning because the past keeps resurfacing. Past hang-ups. Past regrets. Past strongholds.

  So often we forget God knows our struggles and the baggage we carry. We must bring it to Him and say, “God, I can’t keep dwelling on the past. Forgive me for the wrongs I’ve done and renew my mind, Lord. Let me accept this clean slate You’ve so graciously given me. Give me the strength to press on and receive the new things You want to do in my life.”

  We can’t do anything about the past, so what’s the point of dwelling on it? Revisiting the mistakes of yesterday only hardens our hearts and makes us angry and bitter. It puts up a wall that prohibits God from using us to our full potential. Living in the past forbids us from claiming the new beginning God wants to give us. No, we are to obey the Word and forget former things—we are to strive forward (Philippians 3:13). We aren’t instructed to let our past define us, but rather we are to welcome new beginnings (no matter how intimidating they may seem).

  We are to go when He sends us, whether that is spiritually, emotionally, or physically.