Still munching on this frog.
Music helps me get over big hurdles. I left my first marriage playing Martina McBride's Independence Day over and over again on my car's CD player as a reminder to myself that as scared as I was, this was the right thing to do and life would somehow turn out okay. (Of course, somewhere around the NY/Connecticut border, I realized that she was actually singing about a mother who burned her house and abusive husband to the ground. That seemed extreme. So I threw the CD away at a rest stop and switched to Stevie Nicks' Landslide. "I climbed a mountain and I turned around" seemed to capture my dire situation without all the flames.)
Today I'm listening to Brooke White's High Hopes and Heartbreaks, which might just be the best CD title ever. I'm not repeating any one song this time, but rather absorbing and reflecting on the overall message that life is interesting and exciting and messy, and rarely turns out the way we think it will. And I'm thinking about an email I received yesterday from a friend I hadn't spoken to since high school. She's faced down more frogs than I can imagine over the past decade, and yet is doing amazingly well. I wonder if stories like hers--about survival, and finding the next chapter of your life so you can thrive--are so popular because we all have frogs that land on our plate at one point or another, and we long for proof that the effort will be worth it, that there's new life on the other side? I'm grateful to be back in touch with her.
How about you? What music gets you through the challenges? What encouraging stories?
3 comments:
Oh man, my answer to this is a whole other blog. But when my ex walked out, I was getting such jumbled and varied input. I decided I needed to hear God's words all the time. So I found my local contemporary Christian station and it pretty much played 24/7 from April 2007 until the end of 2008. So anything they played during that time period, I promise you, it totally spoke to me.
As for stories, I know so many women who have walked my story before me. And they're all fabulous and have found prince charming (you're included). Those stories, right now - they give me hope. But the ultimate of these is the story of Ruth. I'm waiting for my Boaz, man!!!
Dixie Chicks, "Taking the Long Way"...the entire album, I just love it.
I had a really bad year in 2004 (my dad left my stepmother for another woman, my sister's baby developed a tumor in utero, which caused her to be born prematurely and she died (the baby, not my sister), and a relationship I thought had potential fizzled out and died. And everything pointed to me leaving a job I really loved in Poland, coming back to the States). What got me through were two songs, "Those Who Trust" and Kirk Franklin's "He Reigns". Also, Stevie Wonder's, "For Your Love". Salvador helped, too.
Post a Comment