I Got Nothin’

My dad broke his TV.

He didn’t, really.  But that’s what he calls it, when he hits the wrong button on the remote and changes a setting that scrambles the channel, or produces subtitles, or somehow upends the viewing experience.

He called me frantic.  “I broke it.  How do I fix it?”

“Um.”  I paced the room, trying to figure out what to do.  My dad doesn’t do technology.  And although I most certainly do, I am five hours away with very limited information on how my mother set this up before she passed away.  “What’s it doing?”

Frustration is not my dad’s strong suit.  And this sort of frustration, wrapped up in grief about missing Mom and not knowing how to do something simple, makes him grouchy.  Rather than explain the problem, he started reading me the menu options from the settings menu, over and over.  He cut me off mid-sentence every time I tried to ask a question.  He grew more and more aggravated.

“Dad,” I began again, weary.  “I just need you to tell me—”

“I don’t know why it won’t work.”

Gritting my teeth in frustration myself, near tears, I blurted out the only thing I could think of: “Unplug it.”

Silence.

“Unplug it,” I commanded again.  “Unplug it, sit for five minutes, and then plug it in again.”  I don’t know why I said it, unless it was that this is the usual procedure we use when the modem at our house goes wonky.  “Maybe it’ll reset something.”

“I’ll have to pull the TV cabinet out from the wall,” he grumbled.

“Yeah, okay, but try it?”

He grunted what sound like an affirmation and hung up.  I sat back in the chair and threw up a prayer.  Look.  I’ve got nothing.  I can’t do anything.  I just made that up.  It’s a little thing, I know, but it’s a big thing, too.  You can do something.  I can’t. 

Ten minutes later my Dad called back, cheerful.  The TV was working like it should again.

But I was bothered, that evening, by how very helpless I had been.  Helplessness seems to be the theme of my life lately.  Five hours from home, I can’t fix Dad’s problems.  I can’t even fix mine.  My career is in a tumult thanks to forces far beyond my control; I am subject to authorities I can’t understand; I can’t seem, some days, to get a handle on my sadness or my anxiety.

A few days ago, I had a snotty-nosed crying breakdown in front of my husband.

It’s been coming for a while, I know.  In the wake of mom’s death I started right back at work and life again, double-time, in what I see now was a desperate way to keep the grief at bay.  But the sadness will find you out—and mine, and my anxiety, found me in what was supposed to be a cheerful discussion about an upcoming international vacation.

I didn’t feel much in “vacation mode.”  And I didn’t, and still don’t, feel much like going.

Frustrating.  Part of me feels like I’m failing some grief recovery test.  I had this sense in my mind, when Mom passed away, of where I’d be ten months out from the experience.  Recovering, surely.  Feeling more myself.  Having grown in many ways, hopefully.  Grieving but feeling hopeful. 

Am I there?  Some days.  And then some days I’m flailing, sad, an anxious wreck, incapable of doing anything other than fretting over a million things I can’t control and all the feelings that build up over a week’s time.  This feels, somehow, like failure.  And yet there’s a lesson in it, too.

I can only be me.  I can’t fix the TV.  Some things, most days, are beyond me.

And God loves me here, too.

A lot of times recently I show up to prayer like Pigpen from Peanuts, bedraggled and tired, beset with anxieties.  I don’t have much if anything to offer or say, nothing useful, no sterling meditations on Scripture or questions for God.  I’m lucky if I remember to intercede for people. 

Hi, I say, and light my little candle.

Sometimes that is all I say, though I am present, and I have the strong understanding that it is all God needs or wants from me.  To show up.  To be there.  That’s half the battle.  What I bring with me, how I got there, how I’ll leave—that’s all His business, not mine. 

I’m not used to being a mess. I am the person with all the ends hemmed in and tidied up.  I always know the cure for what ails me.  I am a do-er to my bones.  This version of me—prone to crying jags at unexpected times, too vulnerable to snide comments or well-meant platitudes, guilty over everything I can’t do, so anxious I don’t want to do much of anything other than reestablish my life as a Carthusian monk—isn’t one that I like very much. 

But God loves and knows this me, too.

This has been a grim little meditation, but I’ll end with a funny story that illustrates the point well: my husband and I frequently call our vacation to Italy the worst vacation we ever took.  That’s because during the trip we both contracted norovirus, and the romantic hotel room my husband had purchased—complete with a freestanding bath in the bedroom, and a bathroom that inexplicably had no door—became ground zero for every kind of gastrointestinal distress known to man. 

At one point, we both sprawled out on the vast, romantic bed with its many sheets.  I was clammy, weak, sweating through my pajamas.  He had just staggered out from kneeling for three hours in front of the toilet.  We both diligently tried to choke down some water laced with whatever hydrating powder we had begged in broken Italian from the farmacia.

“This is terrible,” my husband murmured to the ceiling.  And then, wearily, “I love you.”

I laughed in spite of everything.  “I love you too.”

We often joked that the Italy trip sealed our marriage contract for good—because we both saw each other at our absolute naked grossest and worst, and loved each other through it anyway.

And so it is with God.  I flail, I cry, I snot everywhere, I develop irrational fears about random things, I miss Mom, I complain, I wail.  I apologize for being such a mess.  I drag all my everything to the Holy One and sit, weary, while He does to me whatever needs doing.

I know I’m loved.

There’s a special sort of intimacy that comes in our helplessness, when we can’t pretty ourselves up or be special or do anything of particular worth.  There’s a confidence that grows in those times because when you’re loved there you know you’re loved anywhere. 

I got nothin’.  Not for my dad sometimes, not for myself—and sometimes not for God either.  But every time I show up He reminds me that doesn’t much matter. He’s got everything.  And sometimes my job is to be quiet and accept what’s given in gratitude.