My husband is gone this week. He was home last week. Gone the week before. Some seasons it feels as if I’m married to this gust of wind that blows in, changes the landscape, and then rushes right back out. The whole bluster happens so fast that I’m left tired to my core, sidelined by this low-lying soul-fatigue.
This week I began to flirt with despair, wondering how in the world I was ever going to find my stride. Two sick fourteen-month-olds. No husband. No freedom. No sleep. No relief.
Out of nowhere, Steven Holcomb comes to mind.
Last weekend, I watched a special on Holcomb, the driver for our gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic Bobsled team. Holcomb suffers from a degenerative eye disease, and his eyesight had become so poor that he almost retired before the 2010 Olympics. Devastated, his coaches talked him into an experimental surgery that placed a permanent contact lens in his eyes. Ten minutes after the surgery, Holcomb’s eyesight was perfect.
So why was his first run with 20/20 eyesight such a total disaster?
Because Holcomb’s eyesight had deteriorated so much, he had come to rely on other senses to help him navigate. He had learned to “feel” the course instead of see it. His new eyesight was getting in the way of this intuition, of the intricate faith he had developed with the sled.
So, in an act of rebellion, he scratches and nicks and smudges the visor on his helmet. Peering out from behind the assaulted plastic, Holcomb climbs back into the sled. This time, his run is perfect.
In a beautiful scene, the camera zooms in on Holcomb in a room alone, eyes closed, swerving and swooping his way around the room as if he were floating through the curves of the course, moving with the bobsled, dancing. This exercise has become a pre-run ritual.
I had tears in my eyes as I watched him turn and sway with such grace and ease. I thought about how rarely we can really see much at all of life, but how we desperately long for clarity and vision. And, though it’s so hard, how much better off we are relying on faith instead of sight.
Holcomb’s story teaches me that, as it often turns out, seeing isn’t always the best thing. Sometimes believing helps us trust the ride so much more.
I hate it when my husband’s gone. I hate that I have to go one single day without him, that our sweet little babies have to go a single second without the love and fun of their daddy, that I have to keep making my way through life even though he’s gone. And yet, I find myself holding on to the truth that sometimes not-seeing can connect us to something or someone we love in ways that seeing never could.
So, today, since I can’t see my husband, I’m closing my eyes and leaning into the turns and feeling the track and embracing the ride even though I feel scared and unsure. I’m choosing to believe in what we have and I’m choosing to believe in what God’s given us because I know that faith is the handle we hold on to when we can’t see a thing (Hebrews 11:1, The Message). Most of all, I’m trusting that God sees us both with a kind of transcendent God-vision that looks straight through our skin and into the transformation of our souls.
In my here-today-gone-tomorrow marriage, I’m trusting that God put us on this track for a reason. I truly have no clue where we’re headed. I can’t begin to anticipate the particularly difficult curves that will certainly come. My visor is unbelievably scratched and grooved.
So, in lieu of being able to see much of anything (my husband included), I’ll close my eyes and dance around the room, holding on and letting go all at the same time.
Leeana Tankersley
www.gypsyink.com
Leeana’s first book, Found Art: Discovering Beauty in Foreign Places, begins as she steps off the plane in Bahrain, the pin-dot island in the Middle East where she and her Navy SEAL husband spent their first year of marriage. Found Art follows Leeana as her life and her soul are changed forever.
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