I recently was in the hospital waiting for my son to have some testing done. As I waited in the hall, an elderly gentleman was wheeled out after his test and left in the hall to wait for a nurse to take him back to his room. As we sat awkwardly in the hallway less than 3 feet apart, we struck up a conversation. Eventually, our conversation led to why I was there. I explained that my son was having a CT done to see if he had to have open heart surgery. I commented that it’s hard when your kids are going through trials. He nodded his head, and then in his soft southern drawl said, “Everyone moans differently.”

After he was wheeled back to his room his words echoed in the emptiness of the hallway. As we proceeded through multiple tests and appointments with the surgeon, his words seemed to follow me. I’ve heard, “Everyone grieves in their own way,” but for some reason this seemed deeper. Grief is indicative of loss, but moaning is an unsolicited response to emotion. It can be from pleasure. Like when the warmth first touches your lips in the morning, you inhale the fragrant aroma, and you feel the warmth spread slowly down your throat, encompassing your whole body at the first sip of coffee. You can’t help but let a little moan of satisfaction out. Y’all thought I was going somewhere different with that, but yes…that too. Or a moan of frustration when you come home to a sink full of dirty dishes. Or one of sadness. The kind that literally shakes you to your core.

As I was doing a load of laundry the other day and opened the washing machine, I was greeted with a tangled-up mess. A fabric belt had snuck its way into the wash and proceeded to fray and unravel at least ⅓ of itself away. The string had then proceeded to wrap itself around the majority of the load, tying it in a jumbled-up disaster. At first, I tried to carefully untangle everything but quickly gave up and resorted to scissors. By the time I was done, I had a pile of string, a useless section of a belt, and laundry that wasn’t fully cleaned on account of being tied up. Laundry has never been my forte.

My brain has been spinning like the agitator in my washing machine. It will start heading in one direction and then do an about-face only to turn back around. No thoughts are completed, just tumble around with no particular purpose. I find myself trying to follow one train of thought only to have it careen into another one. Back and forth, up and down, side to side, a jumbled mess. As we made the two-and-a-half-hour drive home from the hospital the car was mostly silent. A date has been set for my son to have open heart surgery. Music played but conversations were sparse. My thoughts tumbled. How was my son feeling? What was he thinking? Was he worried? What about my daughter? As she sat unusually quiet in the backseat working on homework, was she just burying her fears? I tried to sort through everything that needed to be done in the next two weeks. Where were we going to stay during surgery? Can Megan miss that much school? Is it practical for everyone to drive over there for the surgery, or should just Justin and I go? I went to bed with all these thoughts still tumbling around in my brain. Too overwhelmed and confused to even discuss them with my husband. Then it hit me. Everyone moans differently. At this moment there is nothing I need to do other than sit here and be present. To feel my fears, worries, and frustrations. I need to take this time to moan, let the natural emotions happen, not try to untangle the mess of thoughts in my head, just rest in His presence. I look back over the day and see God’s hand so clearly. The lady at the hotel who just had open heart surgery in April told me she was praying for my boy. In the room, while he was having his echo done, the tech had his music playing softly in the background. Just as I felt the strings of stress start to wrap themselves around me, two Christian songs came on. The only two that played the whole time we were in there. The fact that we were able to meet with everyone we needed to so that surgery could happen as soon as possible.

That belt, that I so efficiently destroyed, was made with a purpose and design. Obviously, part of that design was not to be washed. It ended up in a less-than-ideal situation and then proceeded to let the agitation of the washing machine start to pick at its edges. Slowly but surely, it began to come undone. In the process, it wrapped itself around any and everything that came close to it. All too often I find myself like the belt when I’m in a less-than-ideal situation, letting the worries and stress of life pick away at my edges. I quickly start to unravel. Spinning out of control, I grab onto everything around me and wrap my arms around it. Clinging to the momentary things desperate to find some balance. In the process, I’m not helping my loved ones but tying them into knots with me. Thankfully, God is much more patient than I am. He created me for a purpose, and He has a plan for my life. He gently starts cutting away all the things that entangle me. The things I have clung to thinking that somehow that’s what will provide stability, when in fact it’s creating even more of a cluster. He doesn’t look at the wadded-up thread and throw it away, but ever so slowly starts sewing it back together. Bringing it back to the purpose it was created for. When life throws us into the washing machine, we’ve got two options. We can cling to the one who can purify and save us and come out on the other side refreshed, clean, and rid of some of the filth we’ve picked up along the way; or we can unravel, tie ourselves up in knots, and come out still stinky, dirty and a wrinkled-up mess.

“Likewise, the Spirit also helps in our weaknesses. For we do not know what we should pray for as we ought, but the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered. Now He who searches the hearts knows what the mind of the Spirit is, because He makes intercession for the saints according to the will of God. And we know that all things work together for the good to those who love God, to those who are the called according to His purpose.” Romans 8:26-28