Chance of Rain

I plunked away on my great-grandmother’s upright repeatedly, too slowly, painfully until I got it right. I was 38-years-old then and facing the inevitability of becoming a widow. ‘He gives and takes away’ and the pain of that loomed dark in our future. The words of the song rang out with the choice we were being called to make. Would we still sing praise if He took away? My husband was battling pancreatic cancer, and I was singing about God in the living room while I taught myself to play piano. It didn’t let me alone. The song played in my head over and over again, kept popping up in other places as confirmation of the lesson I was supposed to learn, not the one on which keys to press to get the chords right, but about deciding to accept what life could bring. It prompted me to choose between darkness and light, to look toward the love. It offered a reason to stay away from the bitterness and anger that often follows hard times like these. Months later, while the worship leader played that song at Andy’s funeral, I smiled up at God with my broken heart. Chance of Rain is about how I did that. My faith grew through this trial. How else could I stand after a funeral? How could I smile in my grief? Losing the tremendous love of my spiritual partner changed me. Those that followed the story as it unfolded were up close to the miracle of those changes. I want to share this story now with those who missed it.During Andy’s illness, I kept our large circle of family, friends, fellow faculty members and students aware of his medical progress through email. Those emails, originally intended to just inform, became inspired works of healing and perseverance. They took others on the journey with us. Those emails are woven in between the narrative of Chance of Rain to share the real-life experience that enriched our faith to carry us through. The private replies to those emails were continued encouragement from the cheerleaders that sat on the sidelines watching us in a deep Job-like trial. We were standing strong of faith as an example to those who watched, though at the time, we thought they were the ones encouraging us. Iron sharpens iron. Bruno Bettelheim in his famous work, The Uses of Enchantment, theorized that children love to hear the tragic parts of fairy tales repeatedly to imagine their own fear of losing a parent, for example, without real risk. The same might be said for the mourners who came to pay their respects for Andy. Though their motivation in attending was based on a love for us both, people also wanted to see how one of their worst fears would play out: losing a spouse. They imagined themselves in my position. It’s what made them cry even if they didn’t know Andy very well. They pictured how they would be or how they would act if it were their life and not mine. Then there’s the smiling. The smiling confuses everyone. People imagine how tragic and devastating the death of their spouse would be, and they are baffled by what they perceive to be my strength. Many complimented me on it. I have tried my best to make it clear to anyone I’ve spoken to that I am a complete and utter baby. I am a whiner and a crier and a complainer. I worry to the point of exhaustion and illness. That’s not strength. The strength that they saw through this trial was God-given. Brokenness brought me to a place of heightened awareness about the voice of God and how to listen better for it. Practice at it has brought me to a place of trust. With that trust comes a great peace that looks like strength during impossibly stormy days.My journal from the year that Andy died is full of the raw misery that kept my thoughts prisoner during the darkest days. While that journal has value to me personally, it will stay in storage to spare readers the runny-nosed, teary-eyed details. Instead, Chance of Rain, tells the narrative of how my faith made it possible to smile and even laugh through the tears.