memoir

Hope in the Silence

/ Laurie / 1 Comment

Hope is defined as a feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. As well as the Cambridge dictionary’s translation, something good that you want to happen in the future or a confident feeling about what will happen in the future.

Aspiration, desire, wish, dream… Additional words that take our thoughts to look for more and anticipate a certain outcome. There is also faith, belief, and conviction, all converging our thoughts to something more.

In the past, I have done a one-word study through the Bible. The first year I did this, my word was “joy,” the second year was “hope,” and the year following was “peace,” but I fell away from that routine; life was lifing and I did not stay true to my practice. Now, 2-3 years out of the practice, I find myself involved again, and due to a series of wonderful events, I have circled back to hope.

In the late fall of 2025, hope started showing its lovely self in the simplest and smallest of ways, but one way was not so simple nor small. As I write this, I am still almost afraid to say it out loud, worried I might jinx myself and this wonderful dream, this lifelong aspiration, won’t come true.

But it certainly is on the cusp of being an actual part of my reality. As I have often shared here and on previous blogs, my lifelong goal is to be a published author. Now I had a couple poems published many moons ago, but in little journals that not many people know of. Heck, in full transparency, I can’t even recall the names.

However, roughly 24 hours ago, I hit the “submit” button and sent in the final edits of my chapter, which I am submitting as my portion of a collaboration book with nine other women. The book’s title? HOPE (vol. II). My chapter: Finding Hope in the Darkness: Learning that God is there even when we think He’s not. It will be filled with 10 separate accounts of beating the odds, facing the giant, and stepping out of the darkness. Strong stories of hurt and pain, but also of faith and hope, to remind those reading that there is something after the tragedy they have experienced, that there is hope, if you only look close enough.

So with a story five decades in the making, I started to reveal my tale. A story that I’ll admit might hurt to read—hell, it hurt to write at moments, drawing up the raw emotion from all those years ago. But I know that it needs to be done. I need to write about it more than in my own private journals. I need to share the raw truth from the beginning. And what helped me through it all was hope.

Hope that the dark and terrible road I was on would eventually come to an end. Understanding that not everyone lived in the cute little house with the white-picket fence, like I imagined. That there were others who, just like me, were simply trying to get through a given day without experiencing the touch of an abusive hand. That in sharing my story and how I made it through all the darkness, I am actually sharing how I found hope and that it must be shared.

I won’t say much more, because I don’t want to give the story away, but it is the perfect beginning for me to take the next step, and that is to write my full story, a memoir of where I came from and how I got to where I am today. My story, from all the dark and ugly parts to the beautiful life I live today. My life as it is today is truly beyond anything I could have imagined. I might not have gotten here, to this wonderful Nana Life I live, without hope, faith, and a whole lot of prayer.

What started as cries for help were so much more… they were actually cries for hope. Hope for something different, something more; hope for the light to shine just a little brighter and guide the way to a better place, a place without pain, a place where most of the tears that fall would be tears of joy.

Hope is a feeling, an emotion that we can use to sustain us, if we only allow it to do so. If we can grab hold of the candle before us, with its barely flickering flame, we can move toward the illumination of hope. The light may be just out of reach, but it’s there, lighting the way out of the darkness. Hope doesn’t show itself without change, either to our surroundings, and most often the change must come from us, whether willingly or not.

It is through the change that comes when we move forward towards the flickering candle, and as the Toby Mac song “Lights Shine Bright” says, “Lights shine bright everywhere we go / Music for the people to illuminate the soul.” This and so many of his songs allow us, through their lyrics, to find hope in faith and the promise for something more.

It is through hope and the faith that is its close companion that healing can begin. With hope and faith, we must also find forgiveness, and that is sometimes quite difficult to achieve. When we have been hurt or abused, we often find ourselves in a pit of darkness. So encompassed by our pain and anger that it seems impossible to fathom forgiving. I am here to say it doesn’t happen overnight, at least it didn’t for me. It took months and months of counseling and even more prayer, but the light of hope did come. I am also going to tell you how much lighter the burden of that part of my story became because I forgave my abuser.

Do you have a burden, a pain you still carry? Is it buried down deep with the hope of “out of sight, out of mind”? Or perhaps you have a new burden that is stealing your hope. Reach down deep and pull yourself up to the surface, share your pain, your secret, and see how hope can set you free. Find someone to help pull you up and comfort you, to walk with you as you go forward. Our trials and tribulations were never meant to be faced alone.

One night I dreamed I was walking
along the beach with the Lord.
Many scenes from my life flashed across the sky.

In each scene I noticed footprints in the sand.
Sometimes there were two sets of footprints,
other times there were one set of footprints.

This bothered me because I noticed that
during the low periods of my life, when I was
suffering from anguish, sorrow or defeat,
I could see only one set of footprints.

So I said to the Lord,”You promised me
Lord, that if I followed you,
you would walk with me always.
But I have noticed that during the most trying periods
of my life there have only been
one set of footprints in the sand.
Why, when I needed you most,
you have not been there for me?”

The Lord replied,
“The times when you have
seen only one set of footprints,
is when I carried you.”

~ Mary Stevenson

I have left you with this, Footprints in the Sand, one of my favorite poems, so that you can ponder the beautiful thought of never being left alone in this life. The sweet understanding that He is always with us, even in our darkest times; and when we are feeling lost and weary, He will carry us safely until we can walk beside Him once again. Walk with Him in the silence, as it is often the most beautiful sound.

Forgive me, I got lost in the silence.

/ Laurie / 2 Comments

I need to start with the disclaimer that I intentionally chose this name and wanted to start this blog as a continuation of my previous, which had been My Nearly Empty Nest, in which I had chronicled my life as my older children were leaving home and heading out into the world. This left me with their younger sister as she would wrestle the likes of middle and high school.

Life, as we all know has a funny way of taking us down paths we don’t expect. That guiding power, that isn’t us… my higher power, whom I call God, has always had different plans for me. I being a stubborn, and often defiant firstborn child (to name a few of my defects) doesn’t always listen. I still tried to do things my own way, to come up with my own fix. Trying and retrying the same thing over and over and over again… ah, the insanity of it all.

Needless to say, God did indeed have bigger plans for me. So in the fall of 2017 He ever so lovingly nudged me, by allowing a series of very uncomfortable events to push me to just reach out for council and I instead was provided an open door. It was then that my then 15yo daughter and I would leave the only home she ever knew in a small rural community, to the bright lights of a big city. It was here, that we, my daughter doing so first, found solace. I watched this young girl, so broken and damaged from her previous environment, begin to thrive… she had finally found her place. She excelled in the classroom, extra-circular activities and even finished all required classes a semester early, doing all of this during a pandemic! She is now in the second semester of her sophomore year at college, where she continues to thrive and works hard and perusing her dreams. She once was the little caterpillar that perhaps maybe even got knocked of the leaf it tried to attach to, but God placed her on a firmer branch and allowed her to stay safe and warm, to thrive and grow until it was time for her to spread her wings and fly.

I told you that God had bigger plans for me, and our move to the “big city” allowed me to find something that I didn’t realize I had even lost, that is until I found it once again. Because of my job, I couldn’t move immediately with my daughter, and the time separated from her was difficult. But what was more difficult, was packing up the chaos that had been my life in that little town for nearly 18 years. I found myself trying to pack and being overwhelmed, trying to downsize, purging a lot of things for the sake of my sanity. I would love to be able to say that I took things to our local thrift shop or to the Goodwill that was 20 miles away, but sadly I took most of the things I didn’t keep to the local dump. It wasn’t worth anything to anyone and it simply needed to be done, little did I know there would be internal purging in the months to come.

The first year was a time of settling in, getting used to all new things around us and trying to learn to manage in the new environment. It wasn’t all sunshine and roses, but it was an improvement of our life the year before, and for the first time in a long time, it had promise. Yet, in the midst of all the adjusting, trying to manage the changes, I knew I needed help; some comfort from the only true safe place I knew. It was a place that was easy to find, as easy as pulling out my phone and doing a google search… but more about that later.

I want to end with a follow up to the above mentioned disclaimer. The name of this blog, this platform allowing me to toss my words onto… is now about the silence that surrounds me when I take the time to truly listen to what He might be trying to tell me. Another disclaimer, fully honest, I don’t always listen well, as He has been quietly telling me for some time now, months really, that I need to be writing. You see as much as I have loved sharing my real-life happenings, sharing the joys and accomplishments of my children over the past years with past sites. For years, I have known, without a doubt, and especially once I finished my degree in 2020, that I need to share my story, to write the memoir of my survival of the abuse I endured as a child and teen at the hands of my father. I have been silent far too long, it is time to speak up, to share my words, my heart and soul; so that I might just maybe help one girl, one woman who is still hurting from the same pain and hurt. Perhaps buried and never spoken, silent.

Join me in the silence, that it might be broken.