I leaned forward over the pages to pour forward the offering I’d received so many years before.
“God isn’t finished with you yet, Macey! He has a plan for you. For your son. If God could bring beauty from the ashes of my life, he can do the same for you. I believe it!”
Even as I said the words, I could feel the nod of God’s head and hear his whisper: I told you so.
I was like a blind man finally able to see; God opened my eyes. If I’d come to Macey with only my perfection — a neat and fairytale life — I would’ve had absolutely nothing to offer. Instead, I came broken, flawed. A divorced, former single mother who thought she’d fallen too far out of the reach of salvation’s hand. Who didn’t yet understand that only a marred life gives birth to the most beautiful redemption.
Right there, as I was humbled by poverty, both Macey’s and mine, God helped me see the miracle of the exchange.
Beauty for ashes. Gladness for mourning. Praise for despair.
Author Madeleine L’Engle said, “An artist at work is in a condition of complete and total faith.”26 As a writer, every time I sit down to write, I trust the page to transform my random and rough words into something worthy. Even so, I know it starts with a draft, an ugly and imperfect collection of words and stories that don’t yet say what they’re supposed to say.
Perfectionism has no place in writing. I know this. It’s an art form honed through failure more than success. Likewise, I’m learning perfectionism has no place in living either. Just as a writer must embrace a rough draft as the necessary means to a book’s successful end, I had to learn how to embrace my life’s process. Including the countless ways my shortcomings and flaws have made me a better character in my own story.
Life must be lived with a writer’s courage. Just as a blank page cannot be improved, nothing can be done with an unlived, untried life. To dare to live will involve mistakes and missteps. You and I will end up with choices we regret, opportunities we missed, words we wish we could go back and say or leave unsaid. Perfection is impossible. But a rough draft, no matter how flawed, sits within reach of an artist’s redemption.
My friend Rabbi Evan Moffic recently wrote words so beautiful and true I wrapped them around me like a blanket: “The broken and the whole live together. They both shape who we are. No life is perfect. We have our highs and lows, our moments of shattered pieces and of divine inspiration. Together they make us a human being, created in the image of God. Together they make us holy.”27
This is the grace — the holiness — of a rough-draft life. Of children who struggle and parents who fail. Of broken marriages and disappointing A minuses. Of trying and stumbling, but finding the grace to get up and try again.
The preschool teacher eventually wrote me back regarding the snack-schedule fiasco. She explained, contrary to my interpretation, that her reprimand wasn’t directed at me. I might have overreacted. What a shocker.
Soon after, we met face-to-face. Sitting in small, preschool chairs made for buns half the size of my own, I told her our family’s story, how overnight we’d become mom and dad to three littles, and how I was still struggling to find my footing in the midst of such upheaval. Rather than judge, condemn, or offer advice, she delivered understanding and lots of grace. Even gave me special permission to bring our snacks in early if needed.
Simply, she allowed me a cushion of space to live this crazy, rough-draft life of mine one day at a time. In the process, she helped me offer myself the same grace.
I will probably always feel driven to be the best mom I can be. It’s part of my DNA, that whole firstborn pursuit of “excellence.” But now I also feel driven to forgive myself my many failings. To endure the missed appointments, tardy slips, and forgotten homework on occasion. Not because I don’t care. But because I know I won’t always get it right.
This is a rough-draft life. And whatever I didn’t like about today, I can always edit tomorrow.
CHAPTER 19
Dying in the Deep
The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can’t give it: you are like the drowning man who can’t be helped because he clutches and grabs.
— C. S. LEWIS, A Grief Observed
Not till we are lost . . . do we begin to find ourselves.
— HENRY DAVID THOREAU, Walden
EIGHTY FEET UNDER THE SURFACE OF THE OCEAN.
Somewhere off the coast of Playa del Carmen, Mexico, Troy and I went scuba diving in blue-green water as clear as crystal.
It should’ve been the time of my life. A last-minute, grown-up vacation. The kids were a thousand miles away, in Colorado with my parents. For the first time in too long, we had eight days together, alone.
So we went scuba diving, something we’d done together countless times. Our descent had begun five or ten minutes before, the two of us along with Alberto, an expert dive master. We’d moved a foot or two at a time, releasing air from our BCDs (buoyancy control devices) and equalizing our ears until we’d settled close to the bottom, negotiating buoyancy to hover above the ocean floor.
Spread out in front of us sat the Santa Rosa. In more than eleven years of diving, it’s my favorite of all the reefs. We’d decided to do it a second time because we’d never forgotten our awe at the first, years before. Just as we’d remembered, the living coral teemed with sea life. Angelfish. Yellow tang. Needlefish. Schools of grouper. Massive barracuda. Countless varieties decorated the water with vibrant color pulled straight from an artist’s palette.
The dive started off level, with the ocean floor and reef below. Then the Santa Rosa turned vertical, becoming a steep wall that plunged into a black abyss, depths unknown. In spite of high visibility, I couldn’t see the bottom. It sat at a depth far beyond human sight. This made the Santa Rosa dive both exhilarating and intimidating, hovering as we were over the dark unknown. It made me thankful for my BCD and the remaining bubbles of air inside, the only thing keeping me from a long and fatal sinking.
For this particular dive, we’d hover right around eighty feet, examine the reef, and take in the marine life. We’d stay far away from the black unknown and instead allow the current to take us to our pickup location.
Everything seemed fine for the first several minutes. At the surface, I’d had some trouble with my mask. As I prepped to tuck-and-roll from the boat into the water, the strap broke. While I balanced on the edge, weighted down with a full tank and gear, the boat captain grabbed me another.
Untried equipment is always risky, but the new mask appeared to be working fine. No leaking or fogging. The oceanic panorama couldn’t have been more clear. A relief. Mask trouble can ruin a good dive.
It happened the moment we settled into formation and started drifting with the current. Without explanation, my heart started to race. The beats came faster and faster, like a gas pedal stuck to the floor. It made no sense. I wasn’t in any danger. Still, my heart pounded like a judge’s gavel on his desk, whack after whack in a futile attempt to gain order.
Thump-thump! Thump-thump! Thump-thump!
With every screaming beat, I felt more out of control. My throat tightened. I couldn’t breathe. The wetsuit seemed to shrink tight around my neck, the air in my throat thick. My regulator continued to churn out oxygen, and I continued to inhale and exhale, albeit in spasmodic motions. But the air didn’t seem to make it to my lungs. I felt out of breath and sucked in big gulps of air in frantic desperation.
I can’t breathe! Dear God, I can’t breathe!
I reached for my regulator, feeling the impulse to yank it from my mouth and stop the choking sensation. An irrational temptation, I knew that. The only thing keeping me alive was the tank strapped to my back and hose running into my mouth.
I’d been diving for more than a decade. I knew the routine, had done the same type of dive countless times. But this time was different. Whether it was the racing heart or lack of air, I wasn’t thinking clearly. Logic kept the regulator in p
lace, but the unyielding urge to pull it out remained. It was as if someone else had taken over and started calling the shots.
Thump-thump! Thump-thump! Thump-thump!
My heart continued to race so fast and hard I thought I could hear its echo like sonar in the water. Like a soundtrack to a horror movie.
I considered shooting to the surface, inflating my BCD, and going straight to the fresh air at the top. A death sentence, I knew. At eighty feet down, the water pressure is so great that the organs — heart, lungs — shrink. The air contracts, pulls in. To shoot to the surface without giving the body time to adjust and expand, slowly, would burst my insides like an overinflated balloon.
God, help! I’m going to drown!
Both water and regulator muffled my screams. I was dying, but no one knew. I flipped around in the water, flailing arms and fins, the water turning my panicky movements into slow motion. Scanning the sea, I searched for my husband, my dive buddy. He’d know what to do.
But I couldn’t find him. In spite of my flailing — or maybe because of it — I couldn’t see his familiar blue fins and neon yellow mask strap through the deep dark of my panic.
This is it. I’m going to die.
I remember the irony of that thought. After more than a year of fearing death by cancer, I would now succumb to an ocean. It didn’t seem fair, to survive one horror only to die by another.
Then Alberto appeared. The dive master.
To this day, I don’t know what brought him to my side. Don’t know how he knew he was about to lose one of his team. He just showed up, out of nowhere, and hovered with me, eighty feet under the ocean, in my panic.
With a glance at my bulging eyes, he knew something was wrong. He took quick inventory of my tank, regulator, and other equipment. When all appeared to be working, he took my hands in his. Held both tight.
Embarrassed, I tried to pull away, pointed to the surface as my signal to abandon the dive.
He wouldn’t release me. Instead, holding my hands tight, he looked at me. Using one hand, he pointed to his eyes. Then to my eyes. Then back to his eyes. He held on, showing no signs of panic and never turning his eyes from my own.
In all, my first panic attack lasted no more than ten minutes. While Alberto held my eyes and my hands, my heart rate returned to normal. When he was convinced I would not die on his watch, he released me and we continued our dive along the Santa Rosa wall. It was just as exquisite as I remembered it.
It was weeks before I understood what had happened during those precarious minutes buried in the Caribbean Ocean. It took a little research and the help of a counselor to wrap my mind around it and give it a name.
But this I knew for sure. I wouldn’t have survived the Santa Rosa if it weren’t for my dive master.
He never said a word, but he refused to let me go.
A few years ago, a good friend and coworker, Danny de Armas, served me up a slice of wisdom I still chew on from time to time: “We all pray for a harvest, for God to give the blessing of bounty,” he said, through the phone. “But when the harvest comes and he gives us everything we’ve asked for, we complain. It’s easy to forget that harvest is a whole lot of work.”
Our diving trip to Mexico came in the middle of a season of harvest.
About the same time the children came, years of professional seed-planting came to fruition. Troy’s business, in its eighth year, had grown multiple times over, requiring him to work late nights and many Saturdays. My career experienced similar growth. Speaking engagements, coaching clients, writing contracts. I couldn’t explain the influx: I’d neglected my career when cancer and kids entered the picture. And yet that’s when the phone started ringing.
For both of us, this is what we’d been dreaming of and working for. Two self-employed business owners hoping to help our babies fly. The irony? We’d planned to be empty nesters when it happened. Not middle-aged parents of three littles.
Thus, the rub. Family was, and always has been, the priority. We knew our children needed our attention and investment, perhaps the littles even more than the bigs. But we also felt the tug of our dreams, the gift of open doors. And the weight of providing for a household that had nearly doubled. Were these opportunities evidence of God’s financial provision?
Welcome to the Cushatt family juggling act. Two parents, two careers. And six high-needs, always-moving children.
That fall, in an attempt to embrace our harvest, I traveled every weekend for two solid months. On weekdays, after flying home from one coast or the other, I unpacked my suitcase, rolled up my sleeves, and dove right into my role as wife and mom. Cooking meals, signing field-trip forms, driving carpool, helping with homework. Not to mention catching up on the office work I’d missed. Come Thursday or Friday, I’d wake well before dawn, load a newly packed suitcase into my car, and head back to Denver International Airport.
The travel, new relationships, and opportunities both honored and exhilarated me. It was a harvest, and I gave thanks for the bounty. It came when we needed it, but also when I least expected it. And, after a year of fighting cancer, parenting teenagers, and learning to love wounded littles, when I could least manage it.
Sometime late September, Troy noticed signs of my unraveling. Like an overdrawn bank account, I’d spent more than I’d brought in for far too long. I was physically and emotionally bankrupt. It wasn’t that I was unhappy with my life. I just didn’t know how to keep up with it. And the not-keeping-up made me feel like I was failing. And the feeling-like-a-failure drained energy and emotion I didn’t have to spare.
Troy could see my atypical exhaustion. Truth was, his schedule had been equally as demanding, and he felt much the same. So he booked an inexpensive trip to a Caribbean beach, just the two of us. One week of quiet and rest and sleep. My parents, God bless them, offered to fly in from Nevada to watch the kids. I didn’t know quite how that would work out — two sweet and untried grandparents with the Destroyers of All Things Valuable. But I didn’t care, couldn’t afford to. I knew I was days from epic collapse.
On a Thursday in October, after I finished one last speaking engagement, I emptied one suitcase and packed another. This one filled with shorts, swimming suit, and absolutely no responsibilities.
For the first two days of our vacation, I did nothing but sleep and eat. I woke up whenever the urge struck me. Ate when I felt hungry. Slept when my eyes would no longer stay open. From late morning until sunset, I lay beneath palm trees and didn’t move.
After a couple of days, I rose from my coma.
Then the Santa Rosa. My descent into the deep. And the panic that almost kept me there.
Jesus’ disciples knew all about water, waves, and the terror of a possible drowning. At least four grew up on the Sea of Galilee, fishermen who knew how to watch the clouds and save their necks.
So when Jesus suggested an innocent, “Let’s go over to the other side of the lake,” they jumped aboard the boat and set sail toward the far shore.28 They’d done this a hundred times before.
But they didn’t expect the storm. A “squall,” Luke says, fierce and consuming. One moment everything was fine, the next the boat was about to capsize. These were experienced fishermen, more qualified than most in navigating an unexpected storm. But this wasn’t an ordinary storm.
Thump-thump! Thump-thump! Thump-thump!
Terror coursed through the veins of every boat passenger who wasn’t divine. Peter. James. Matthew. John. Twelve friends and Jesus-followers in a boat about to go under.
Oh, God, help! “We’re going to drown!”29
I imagine the storm muffled their screams. Undisturbed, Jesus slept. His breathing and his body rhythmic and sure. No gasps or panic, no reaching or grabbing. Only peace.
His disregard of their terror seems heartless at best, cruel at worst. How could Jesus remain unruffled, unsympathetic? I’m sure his divinity and relationship with the maker of the waves provided him a unique perspective, an awareness of God that calmed frayed
nerves.
But his humanness would’ve felt fear too. A heart beating out of control, breaths coming too quick, a tight chest and frantic eyes.
Even so, faced with the same furious squall, Jesus remained at peace while his companions writhed in panic.
Why? What made the difference?
This was the question I needed answered, eighty feet under the ocean and every day above it. I’ve lived long enough to know that unexpected squalls are part of the deal. Just because the sun is shining in the morning doesn’t mean you’ll see it in the afternoon. This life is unpredictable and, at times, terrifying. But I’m tired of the fear and bouncing up and down with every unexpected wave. I want to know the secret to sleeping in the boat.
Jesus answered my question with a question of his own.
“Where is your faith?”
These are his only recorded words to a nearly drowned, still-trembling band of followers. I can’t help but wonder if, in that four-word question, we have the secret to a peace that rises above the waves.
Where is my faith?
When cancer rocked my boat, my faith was in my ability to predict the ultimate outcome. In doctors’ words and test results. In my ability to manage my pain, eat organic food, and keep the cancer from recurring.
When my son decided to choose a life contrary to our beliefs and values, my faith was in my ability to talk him out of his foolishness, to strong-arm his choices and deliver ultimatums. To will him into becoming the man I wanted him to be.
When three grieving littles were added to my home, my faith was in my supermom ability to fix them, heal them, and make up for all their horrific losses. To be their savior and deliverer of hope.
Where is my faith? In myself, more often than not. Which is why an unexpected squall — every last one of them over the span of two years — unraveled me. A boat anchored to itself is not anchored at all.
Shoring up your faith in the right place is far more important than simply claiming to have it. If I believe only in what I can see, manage, and control, sooner or later something will come along to rock my boat. When that happens, I’ll scream into the wind, “I’m going to drown!”
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