Have you ever gone to bed and lay there wondering why you can’t fall asleep even though it’s late and you have a lot to do the next day, but the laundry has been done, and the dog has been taken out, and you found the paperwork you have to take with you tomorrow, and…OH NO YOU LEFT THE CHILI OUT AND YOU MADE A QUADRUPLE BATCH SO YOU COULD FREEZE IT SO IF YOU DON’T GET UP AND DEAL WITH IT RIGHT NOW YOU WILL LOSE A QUADRUPLE BATCH OF CHILI, thus ushering you into the next hour of heart-pumping adrenaline which will keep you from sleeping even though you finally did that thing that you’d forgotten to do that was keeping you up in the first place?

No? Just me?

We’ve been in Bozeman for two months now. Just a touch over two months. Just long enough to start to realize you aren’t actually on vacation with everything you own, but you do, in fact, live here now and you have a local bank account to prove it. Except normal life really hasn’t started for us yet like it would have if we were still living in Oklahoma and that’s a weird thing all in itself. Social media, for all the ways I love it for keeping up with people I wouldn’t otherwise be able to, has been stabbing us in the heart for the past few days as we watch the life we once had begin again. Without us.

School starts late in Montana, but it’s funny to hear people here talk about schools in other places and how early they all start. It’s all relative, I suppose. September 8 is our magic go-time. My girls have transitioned as well as you can expect four teens and tweens who have been moved across the country to transition. They miss friends. They miss the familiar songs of our old church. They miss the familiar everything.

And I understand. And I don’t know if they cried on Thursday when school in Oklahoma began again or not, but I did for them and my heart aches on their behalf. There is a true grief aspect to a transition like this that hits in waves. Sometimes it hits when one of us says a common phrase that A2 used to say and we all laugh a second and then get quiet because…he’s not here with us anymore. Sometimes it hits when we watch a movie that has a theme or a scene that hits a little too close to home in the betrayal or loneliness category. Sometimes it just hits because it just does.

Leaving a hard situation helps because you don’t have to think about it all the time anymore – it’s not constantly in your face anymore…but it also makes it easier to just stuff the hurt away. And when you stuff the hurt away…eventually it has to bubble up again and so it does. This is one of those weeks it’s spilling over.

The songs that theme this time waffle between Sheryl Crow’s Change  and Matt Maher’s Lord, I Need You and Wayne Kirkpatrick’s It’s Me Again.

Basically, I’m the same mess I’ve always been in a much prettier setting.

And yet, at some level I can’t even name or explain we are still being sustained. And the hurt and the need is drawing me back to the Word again in a way I haven’t been drawn to in a very long time.

And so I will continue to cling to the promises of the only One I know who will keep them. And I continue to pray through my impossible list. And I continue on.

Okay, maybe I’m not as strong as I pretend to be
Okay, maybe I’m just as insecure as everybody else

But I tell myself, maybe
I can work it out alone
And no one else will ever know

You there, watching and waiting with the patience of a saint
While I wallow in self-indulgent, paranoid philosophies

But I’m no Socrates, baby
And in the end it’s like a marathon
I’m running straight to you

I can’t seem to take this ride with ease
I can’t see the forest for the trees
I’m coming undone
Hello, it’s me again
It’s me again

Tonight, while all the world is sleeping I will roam the halls
Consumed, with the obsessions of a terminal insomniac

Under attack, save me
From the poets and the poltergeists
Playing in my head

I can’t seem to take this ride with ease
I can’t see the forest for the trees
I’m coming undone
Hello, it’s me again
Yeah, me again

Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah
Me again

So you tell me not to worry
But I’m a frightened little child
With a strong imagination
That can always be found
Running free and wild

I can’t seem to take this ride with ease
I can’t see the forest for the trees
I’m coming undone
Hello, it’s me again
Yeah, it’s me again