Thank God for Natalie Merchant, part 2: Life Is Sweet

Back in August, I had what any normal person might call a series of unfortunate events. However, I'm not exactly what you would call "normal".

Suffice to say, I had my rear brakes changed a week before I was to move from one side of town to the other. After they were changed, I noticed I would skid a little every once in a while when stopping. I called to have it checked out the next day, but before the end of the day I called, I rear ended another vehicle because I couldn't stop. This was two days before the move. My insurance company hired an outside agency to inspect the vehicle and they could find nothing wrong with the brakes.

Yes, I cried "injustice!" Oh, believe me, I cried a lot. I was mad, I was frustrated, I had no idea what was going to happen financially. The first week was a whirlwind. And a lot of waiting. The next few weeks, everything got sorted out. So my insurance is going up, but they covered the repairs. But, that's not the point of the story...

As soon as I saw the accident happening, I could feel the Lord say deep down in my spirit, "I've got this." I would like to say that I was okay with that, but if you read the above paragraph, you'd know I was lying. I was scared witless. This car was my baby. I didn't see how it could be "got" if it was smashed. And in the midst of a move from one side of town to the other, I was just plain worried. Yet as I stood in the parking lot that I and the other driver pulled our cars into while we waited on the police to show up for the police report, I had my head on my car, and I once again heard God say, "I've got this." Actually, he said, "You can stop worrying now, I've got this." Yeah, he knows how I tick.

Over the next few weeks, I spent a lot of time talking to Him. Mostly in my new bedroom or in the rental cars I drove during the month my car was in the shop. During this month, I discovered two things musically: Spotify and the gloriousness that is XM satellite radio.

First of all, Spotify. I discovered this a short time before I moved, and was searching for new music one day after the accident. I ran across some Natalie Merchant songs I hadn't heard before. Namely, "Life Is Sweet" from her "Ophelia" album. How I never heard this some before in my life, I have no idea. I have a feeling I'd listened to the song before, but never really heard it, if you know what I mean. But having walked through a few months of inner healing for things like self-pity, rejection, abandonment, loneliness... the first line caught me and I knew I needed to listen. As I listened, I found so much LIFE in this song, that I would play it on repeat, just to soak up the message it contained.

Besides this, I also discovered a few gems on the satellite radio in the rental car. One of my favorites was "Closer To Fine" by the Indigo Girls. The line that stood out to me was "The best thing you ever taught to me, was to help me take my life less seriously. It's only life after all." Because by this point, I was realizing... Life isn't worth getting all caught up in worry about. It's worth so much more. Life is worth living. Worrying isn't living. Worrying is death in a breathing body, because it's all hypothetical exaggeration of something that probably won't happen in the first place. And I discovered over this month of not having my own car that I was beginning to worry a lot less than I ever did before. And I was also smiling a lot more. Not that I don't smile a lot as it is. My friends and even complete strangers compliment me on or notice my smile probably more than anything else. While the smiles were always real, there tended to be an underlying current of worry that I couldn't really enjoy anything as much as I wanted to because of... whatever. The because was never really clear. Just that general sense of worry. Basically that anything good can't truly be enjoyed because it will be taken away.

The mood of my mind shifted on Labor Day. I can't forget this. I slept in and didn't feel the need to get up and do something, or the guilt I normally felt for laying in bed and not doing anything. I just felt happy. When I finally did get up, I ended up reading a number of articles online, many of them on topics of how to improve your quality of life, getting plenty of ideas and encouragement (most of them being from this website: http://www.marcandangel.com/ ). I also worked on and completed a painting I'd begun a couple weeks prior. When I finished the painting, I felt like I had had the most wonderful shoulder massage! My shoulders had been killing me over the previous weeks due to constantly sitting hunched over my computer at work, and just plain old... you guessed it, worry!

That day was the start of something wonderful. I literally feel like a switch was thrown in my thought processes. I had begun to realize that, like the lyrics in the song say, "life is sweet, in spite of the misery, there's so much more, be grateful." These songs, "Life Is Sweet", "Closer to Fine", and a number of other songs, have become my hymns. More often than not, they get sung loudly in my car (with her shiny new "nose job") to my God who has "got it" when I don't get it.

It's been such a magnificent journey, I did something I never thought I would ever be decisive enough to do... I got a tattoo on my left forearm with the words "life is sweet" written in my own script. It seemed like the right thing to do, to commemorate such a drastic change in mindset.





(I have goosebumps in the picture because it was COLD the day I got my tattoo! This is maybe an hour or so after I got inked, on my "half birthday" 28 October 2011)