Barking and Shouting

For the first time in my life, Athens felt hollow. It was empty even with 90,000 people in it. The red and black streets bustling with anticipation somehow seemed deflated. I put on a happy face, stuck a “G” on my cheek, and I took the girls to the Dawg walk and the stadium. It actually was fun to run into old friends, to feel the red racing through my veins again, to be with my crew, my mom and my brother and his family. But way down deep it was stinging. I stuffed it all day because I just wanted it to feel like Athens again. The carefree, joyful, fun place it has always been (with the best food ever).

I have never said this in my life, but I was almost glad we lost.  To Missouri. Wow, I really wrote that. The streets of Athens on Saturday afternoon were almost silent with thousands of people moping to their cars. I felt like I had a reason to be so down with all of the disappointed faces.  It would have been more painful to walk Lumpkin Street feeling decimated while people were celebrating, cheering, and barking, anxiously awaiting another week between the hedges, continuing on toward the SEC Championship dream.

I just wish there was something in my life untouched by his absence.

 It’s not that I am all that down all of the time. In fact most of my day to day life looks exactly the same whether my dad is walking the earth or not. But grief has a nasty way of sneaking up on you, of attacking your mind and heart when it is least convenient.  I just want a break from it, a vacation from the pain. I majorly need a happy place.

Athens has always been that place, in all stages of my life—from my first game between the hedges as a young child up through dates, even breakups, friendships, family events, football games, walks down Milledge, and each windows-down-hair-blowing-radio-blaring-drive-around-town-kind-of-day. Athens is so many things to me.  I joined my first church in the Classic City, Redeemer Presbyterian, and I finally got it, deep in my soul, what it means to know and be known by the Living God.  

In the past, the green blades of grass on North Campus have provided a soft place to fall. But not this time. Four generations of my family have walked through the Arch, but instead of a beautiful gateway into our sacred family bond, it now looks like an ominous handcuff, linking me to my sadness.  Every ring of the Chapel bell that once resonated in my heart like home sounds like an alarm only I can hear telling me something is absolutely wrong.

 

 I desperately want something I love to feel the same without him. I had hoped to check my huge five piece set of emotional baggage somewhere in Atlanta, and cruise into Athens uninhibited, unfettered, and untouched by mourning. But there is no escaping grief. There is no place on earth I can go and not think of him, either remembering him or wishing he were there. I would settle for being able to call him and tell him about it, hearing the joy in his voice at all that I am experiencing. But I can have none of it.

My dad’s absence is suffocating. He is missed in the stories at the tailgate of his college roommates (who have been in the same spot at “the Tree” for every home game for the past 40 years). He filled up each place with his laughter and joy and easy way of being. My friend Cabell reminded me that he was usually the center of attention—not in an obnoxious “look at me” kind of way, but in an “everybody wants to hang out with him because he tells the funniest stories and genuinely brings joy and light” kind of way. When the person whose presence fills up the room is gone, the room just feels empty no matter how many people are in it. Even if it’s a stadium and there are 90,000 screaming fans.

So in Athens, I learned that there is nowhere I can flee from my grief.
But there is also no place I can go from His presence. Every time I want to just hide under the covers and not face another day, I hear His voice (and my two year old screaming “Mommy!” on the monitor at 5:45 a.m.—which will be 4:45 a.m. tomorrow, thank you Daylight Savings Time).

As C.S. Lewis put it, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts in our pain.”

Certainly, there are times in suffering when God seems distant or absent, but this does not mean that He is in reality not right in the thick of it with us. This is when the Word of God and His promises mean the most. Where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. “I will never leave you nor forsake you,” He has said. “The Lord is close to the brokenhearted and saves those who are crushed in spirit," the Psalmist wrote.

And so in a stadium filled with people screaming and barking (at least in the first half), I hear Him shouting to my heart, “Do not be troubled! Do not be dismayed!” and I feel a peculiar joy flitter through my soul.

You see, I am learning that only suffering can sift the heart so completely, and only in deep sorrow can joy sometimes be found. Suffering is at the core “of why people disbelieve and believe in God, of why people decline and grow in character, of how God becomes more and less real to us…And when we look to the Bible to understand this deep pattern, we come to see that the great theme of the Bible itself is how God brings fullness of joy not despite but through suffering, just as Jesus saved not in spite of but because of what He endured on the cross. And so there is a peculiar, rich, and poignant joy that seems to come to us only through and in suffering (Tim Keller, Walking with God through Pain and Suffering).”

And that joy, the kind that startles and somewhat haunts me in moments of remembrance, is more searingly beautiful than any other kind of joy I have ever known. It is a hopeful joy hitched to a redemptive promise.

I am grateful for God’s voice that shouts to me in my pain and nourishes me like Weaver D’s comfort food for my hungry soul (or East West Bistro, or DePalma’s, or my favorite Athens restaurant the Last Resort—or Zim’s and Five Star Day Café- I know they are no longer there but a girl can dream).

Every now and then I think of my dad without hot tears forging paths down my face, and I feel his warmth in the memories. I count that as progress.

And it doesn’t hurt as much when Georgia beats Florida. Like they did tonight. For the third year in a row. That makes me smile, too.

O Joy that seekest me through pain,
I cannot close my heart to thee;
I trace the rainbow through the rain,
And feel the promise is not vain,
That morn shall tearless be.

-George Mattheson, 1882