Once all the best was mine...Tipp City yea, I'm still here.

So, ummmm, yeah. For e'ry bit woohoo hallelujah positive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound that I was yesterday, I am the penultimate today.

Life is like that I guess. I don't know, I am fully just guessing. I having one of those days when I am thinking of that shirt that says,"Jesus Loves You...Everyone Else Thinks You Are An Asshole" and thinking the opposite applies to me. E'ryone loves me, Jesus thinks I am asshole.

I am. I am willfully disobedient in a few very small areas and I kinda think that I would like to be Nicole Arbour's BFF 4 life. I am not even kidding. It'll be me and Nicole Arbour and Lisa Lampanelli and we'll be toking it up with Johnny Hopkins and Slone Kettering. Okay, maybe not, but oblige me, I am in a massive funk today and I trying desperately to pull myself back on course.

I slept poorly. Had crazy, crazy dreams about my doctor and trying to get to an appointment, and so when I came back from dropping the boy off at school, I curled up on the couch. My "old mangy, transient" husband stopped by while I was sleeping and that's when I went downhill. He doesn't speak to me at all anymore, not even about things that matter. About six months ago, I thought that we were over all that but I guess is skank-ass girlfriend heard we actually had several civil conversations in a row and freaked out.

(Queue "Where is God?" by Oliver Adams)  (So obscure, I can't find it anywhere for the link.)

I know you are probably thinking at this point, what does Tammy and the Amps have to do with any of this? Well, I am glad you asked.

Tipp City has been on my mind a lot lately. I have no clue why. Not really. I mean, it's about equidistant to the grandparents so there's a bonus. It's closer to a lot of other family. It's closer to things that keep my daughter happy. It's a bit like whence I came from but without me having to constantly relive my backstory that involves being a complete douche to people who didn't deserve it. I could be me without having to prove or disprove any notions about who I am.

It's not the first time in my life I have considered Tipp City as a place to call home. Several years ago, sigh, for whatever reason, my husband (who grew up in Miami County) always wanted to go spend our free time there...despite saying he hated everything about Miami County. There's a great park in Tipp City that we would end up at occasionally. A great park where we by the end of the journey would have met new people who actually sat and hung out with us as we all watched our kids play together. At the time, his parents were helping us out quite a bit and moving to Tipp would have made sense. (My mom would have moved up there eventually because she's good like that.)

Anyway...so I totally feel like I don't fit in, don't vibrate right, don't something in my present situation. Everyone so concerned all the time with matters of consequence. Everyone so booked to the gills with stuff. I know some of it is the way that this pending divorce, the bankruptcy, the complete and total lack of ability to claim any sort of worldly success is totally f****ng messing with me. I don't need to be mega anything, but honestly no part of my life plan ever involved having to hang my head in shame and mortification as I told people my husband left me for livestock. No part of my life plan ever, ever, EVER saw me 29 days from 40 and so broke I can't even pay attention.

Shrug. This is not exactly inspirational. I am not there today. I want to be. I have cried out to the Lord so much since this morning, I think He is letting all go straight to voice mail.

What did I ever do so horrible in my life that I deserved to be cheated on and all my dreams shattered?

NOTHING.

God allowed it. No clue why and still working through some emotion on that. I am not the woman I was when this started. There is good in that but so much bad. I don't think that a lifetime in prayer and therapy will heal this gaping chest wound that my husband and his self-centered malady left me with. There is no beauty for ashes today. Today, once again God chose not to make all things new or to work all things to the good of Jen who loves him, I willfully and willingly stepped into being a full-on, stay-at-home mom. I don't regret the time. I only regret that the world is not so accommodating and that further exacerbating the annihilation of my confidence that has come from the actions of my husband is the clear cutting that comes every-time I unsuccessfully try to sell myself to some prospective employer.

I can not press any further in without actually going home to the Lord himself. That my friends is the truth of my situation. I have nothing but God and his promises. That I have survived this far in this situation is nothing but the grace of God. No joke. Pressing in doesn't mean you don't feel the pain. I feel the pain. Daily. Some days hourly. I live in a world where hypocritical women's studies lecturers fuck husbands because of their own damned brokenness. Your actions destroyed my world, my life, my peace. I fucking hate you both. May God deal with you ever so severely.

I hate this world.

I am tired of so much.

I just want to move to Tipp City and live out the remainder of my years in the relative peace of Miami County. Once...all the best...it was mine. I never once took it for granted. I really didn't But here I am. Busted and broken and abandoned. Tipp City, yeah, I am still here. And it beats the hell out of moving back to Germantown.

I never claimed perfection.

I just want to be content.

Get Busy Living Or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part To Save The Scene And Stop Going To Shows)

Sometimes, little things in life act as confirmation. Confirmation that you are on the right track. A nod that you are doing the right thing. A wink that you are in fact in the right place at the right time. This past Sunday was one of those times for me.

The ladies in my mom's group (and a few other really) have teased me before about my propensity for using movies to apply spiritual principles and moral concepts. So, you can imagine my utter joy when our pastor began to preach out of "Shawshank Redemption" on Sunday morning. The sermon entitled "Get Moving" is the first of four about spiritual growth. Now, if you know me, you also know that I revel in using song lyrics as blog titles and so as I headed home that morning, I found Fall Out Boy's "Get Busy Living or Get Busy Dying (Do Your Part to Save the Scene And Stop Going to Shows)", stay with me, and give me a few paragraphs and I will tie it all together.

Get busy living or get busy dying. Those words have been bouncing around my head the past several days like a truckload of Superballs in gymnasium during an earthquake. Get. Busy. Living. Get. Busy. Dying. There is no in middle. I know this because it is what I am discovering through this particular trial of my life. To chose nothing, to chose complacency, to try to balance on the fence is a passive choice toward death and decay and stagnation. It's okay to have a bad day. It's okay to react in anger. It's okay to plot to send twenty-five pounds of micro-fine red glitter to those who have harmed you. It's not okay to stay there. To stay in the dark is to stay imprisoned.

But how, Jen, how do start living you don't know what I am up against. I don't, you are right but I do know what I have waded through in my life and I am still standing. I am currently living in a season of my life where if I was not actually living it I would very much think that I was making some of this stuff up. I made a conscious choice in this trial early on that I was not going to live in the dark side. However, I am not skipping through a field of poppies with a song in my heart and a gleam in my eye every day. No, no, some days the feeling is much more that of being in a bog covering quicksand covering a black hole. Some days the weigh of my comforter is too much to deal with, let alone a failing marriage, a financial crisis, endless unemployment and all my motherly duties. I get it.

The Fall Out Boy title resonates with me because I married a musician. When he started making connections that were counter to what we had said we wanted for our family, I took a step back. Spirit led me that way. I don't belong there. I miss it sometimes but truth be told but I would rather suffer as a daughter of Christ than reign as the queen of the underground. I am just too sparkly to be that dark. I know that I am none of the things his band mates said about me and none of the lies he told his girlfriend about me are rooted in truth. They keep their folly, I keep my soul. It seemed like a fair trade.

Our circumstances may be different but the suffering is the same. So while you are there..."alone in your electric chair"...what is it going to be? The choice is entirely yours, that's what freewill is all about. I made my conscious decision way, way, way before the sneaky behavior, the lying, and ultimately the cheating happened. I didn't just make a declaration that life was going to be a certain way and then POOF! Snarky, sardonic Jenny was suddenly transformed into Polyanna. It's been a journey. You can't change without movement, reaction, refining and pruning. There is mourning involved. There are tears. There are walls. There are choices to be made.

So, what's it going to be are you going to get busy living or are you content to spend the next forty years dying?

Get busy. Get moving. Go

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Below is the sermon entitled "Get Moving" from Christ United Methodist Church in Kettering, Ohio. I encourage you to follow the sermon series on Vimeo or if you are in the greater Dayton ares come out and join us on Sundays at 9, 10 or 11:15.


September 13, 2015 Barry DeShetler Get Moving – Exploring Christ from Christ Church United Methodist on Vimeo.

Guinnevere

Original Poetry by Jenny Reibert-Wolfe ~ Copyright 2015

Shards

Sometimes, I write.

Sometimes, it's good.

One of those things may be true here.

Without further adieu, Shards....

Shards - Original Poetry by Jenny Reibert-Wolfe Copyright 2015
Graphics arranged by Jenny Reibert-Wolfe using picmonkey.com