Not too heavy

For a few weeks now, I've visited blogs that have sported the "Pour Your Heart Out" button and I've thought, "I couldn't do that." Sure, I've whined and ranted here, but I'm not sure that I've ever really poured my heart out.

For some reason, today feels like the right time. I was reading some entries on a message board about dreams and people visiting us in our dreams and it made me think of this experience. So, even though the Pour Your Heart Out blog carnival officially happens on Wednesdays, I'm posting mine today -- before I lose the nerve.

It happened about three or four years ago. I was at a very spiritually low point in my life. I missed Mass frequently. I rarely prayed and when I did it was either unemotional, memorized prayer or frantic pleadings asking God to fix whatever was urgently wrong in my life. I became more and more wrapped in my own life’s drama and less and less aware of and available to people who might need what I had to offer. For all practical purposes, God was dead to me and I, in turn, found myself emotionally dead as well.

I may have turned my back on the Lord, but He continued to pursue me. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that He sent Jesus to visit me in a dream one night.

In this dream, I was walking in a small town when someone invited me to come meet Jesus. I went into what looked like a beach house and waited with five or six other people whom I didn't know. Soon we were ushered into a room where Jesus stood at the front. One by one, we approached him and spoke to him.

I was skeptical that this really was the Son of God. When it was my turn to stand in front of him, I quizzed him – where had I gone to high school, what were my pets' names? Of course he knew.

Realizing that I was in the presence of Jesus, I pulled my arms into my chest and leaned into him, craving his comfort. He reached out and picked me up. I was horrified! I was so fat. Certainly too fat for him to lift me.

“No!” I cried out. “Put me down, I am too heavy!”

To which Jesus replied, as he held me in his arms, “Nothing is too heavy for me.”

I awoke from that dream with an eerie sense of peace and an absolute assurance that I had been in the presence of Christ and nothing is too heavy for him.

At first, I felt like that dream was about my weight. That it didn't matter to Jesus what I weighed -- and at that point in my life, maybe that was what it was about -- giving me permission to stop beating myself up for weight.

In the years since that dream, it's come to mean so much more. Since that blessed encounter, there has been some heavy stuff in my life -- and I'm not just talking my hind end. People tell me that I am so strong when in reality I sometimes wonder if I can get out of bed. When my feet hit the floor, it is sometimes by the grace of God.

And then there are times when I do feel strong. When I feel like I can physically and emotionally take on the world. Those are moments of grace, too, when I try to be mindful enough to say "Thank you, Jesus" for this day, for this feeling, for this life.

Regardless of whether it's a day when I'm tying a knot and hanging on or it's one where I'm ready to take a victory lap, I will always be grateful and humbled by the experience of that dream.

The dream

Life around here has been a little stressful lately. Ok -- more than a little stressful. I knew it had gotten really bad when I had THE DREAM.

I have this recurring dream that shows up whenever I feel like my life is spinning out of control. As if I don't know it in my waking hours, my sleeping psyche has to remind me of all the craziness I'm living in.

In this dream, I am back in college. It's the end of the semester and I have to take a final for a class that I haven't been to all term. So I'm running around campus, trying to cram for this impossible test. Then I realize that I've missed so many classes that the prof is going to automatically fail me, which will sink my GPA and ruin my scholarship. So I head to the registrar's office to try to convince them that I dropped the class but that someone in their office didn't process my drop request. Which of course is a total lie.

And then I wake up, usually with my heart racing and my head all sweaty.

It's really not a nice way to start the day. I'm off to bed soon again. Let's hope it's a dream-less night.

The family that is awake together...

...will probably be crabby together tomorrow. It's 12:47am and everyone but Annie and Dungy is awake. Seems like insomnia must be a genetic trait in our house.

I'm awake because I fell asleep in the bathtub earlier and got a little re-charge, until I awoke in extreme neck/shoulder pain, which is probably a good thing so I didn't drown. So now I'm finishing up some work while catching up on my DVRed shows.

Mike just emerged from the basement, where he was doing something in his office. Maybe work. Maybe watching videos recently resurrected from his high school days and uploaded to Facebook.

Charlie had a bad dream about falling off a cliff and woke up screaming. I felt bad for him -- he was really scared when I got up to him.

And Robbie is awake for some unknown reason. Maybe Charlie's screams woke him? At any rate, he's awake too, having had his own six hour re-charge.

Right now, this is feeling like a 3am night. As in that's about the time it seems I'll be shutting down for the night. This is not a new issue for me. I am generally fairly nocturnal.

Fortunately, tomorrow is Halloween, so there will be enough sugar around to keep me -- and the rest of the family -- raring to go.

Bursting my bubble (bath)

We've lived in our current home for a little more than 10 years. We moved here from a 30-year-old, 3-bedroom ranch with no basement. When we started thinking about moving and considering what kind of house we wanted, Mike really wanted to build. Although I would have been happy moving to another older home, I agreed to new construction with one caveat.

The new house HAD to have a garden tub with whirpool jets.

As construction got underway and we began to choose paint colors, carpet and trim packages, not surprisingly, the costs of construction began to rise. So one day, Mike said to me, "You know, that whirpool tub is $1,500. We could really save a lot by going with a plain garden tub."

Now, if I were a more sacrificial, fiscally responsible wife, I would have nodded my head and said, "You're right, dear. Whatever you think is best."

But I wasn't. And I didn't. Instead, I think I said something like, "No way! That tub is the ONLY thing I have an opinion about in this house and I am not giving it up."

It wasn't that I was just being stubborn. It was that after three years of bathing in a cramped tub stained rusty with iron deposited by well water, I was looking for a little luxury and relaxation. I was looking for this:



(And yes, in my bathtub fantasy, I was a skinny diva with flowing hair and flawless skin.)

But like most mothers, I've come to accept that dreams and reality are often on divergent paths. Oh, don't get me wrong. Grand bubble baths do take place in my whirlpool tub. But unlike the "relax" picture above, they look more like this:



Fast forward to tonight. Cooler temperatures have arrived. My body is weary from too much time spent in the car, from too little sleep, and, alas from the sheer effect of nearly 40 years logged on these bones.

The kids are all asleep. Mike is engrossed in the new Knight Rider series. These are the times that my garden tub with whirlpool jets were made for. So, I headed for the bathtub -- MY bathtub -- and this is what greeted me:



There was no Godzilla with one arm in my relaxing bath dream. No triceratops waiting to impale my tush, no giant squid or miniature pterodactyl.

When we built this house, had I realized that the kids were going to take over the only space that I planned to call my own, I would have called dibs on the washer and dryer.

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