July 2016 - The Matthews Story

Tomorrow is Robyn and I’s ten year wedding anniversary. But I won’t post tomorrow, because I’m shutting my phone off for the week to vacation with her.

Always, I am fiercely aware of the families who are, today, in the same place we were when Ezra’s life was a question mark for us. And so, as always (seriously, thank you all for all your support), I’ll mention a way you can help to change our story for another family – I’m $800 short of my $2,500 goal for my first fundraiser under Because of Ezra’s new name (Beat Nb). I’m running 7 miles in Boston with 9,000 other people at Falmouth Road Race.
The day I met Robyn, she walked into a Smart Wireless store in the Everett Mall with her mom, wearing a rainbow belt and short hair. Robyn was beautiful, and she was odd, in a way I found maddeningly appealing. I was intrigued.
For our first date, we went to The Old Spaghetti Factory, and she was impressed I tipped well. Robyn had lost her dad at 9 to cancer, and her mom, Vivian, had been a waitress most of her life. Now, her mom is my mother in law, and I love her. She keeps it real, although it’s hard for me to see she’s been getting heavily involved in listening to country music lately.

Neither of us asked the other out – Robyn handed me her phone when I came to see her the first time after I met her, and on it was her friend Leah who asked me to come on a double date with them. Now, after a decade in different cities, Leah lives in St Pete with her husband Justin and their new baby, Nova.

Robyn and I had only known each other a matter of months when I asked her to move to Tampa with me, as I’d already been planning to when I met her, but had called my folks and said “hold on, I met a girl.” She came with me, and moved into an apartment down the street, and I moved back in with my folks for the 4th time, at 23 years old. She happily cried when we were on a boat one day in St Pete and I asked her to be my wife.

At our wedding in Marysville shortly after, I played her a song I’d written for her (we’d met some friends in Tampa, but most of our people were still Seattle folk). We got an apartment in Tampa; Ezra’s first home. I was leading worship at Grace Family Church Van Dyke at the time, and through Ezra’s entire cancer diagnosis, treatment, and death, our church family was close and kind to us.

We were given three sons, two died in 2010. A fourth came into our home but has since left, although he remains our son.

Over the years, we’ve driven across the country, shared meals across the world, met many people we love, and I strongly believe we’ve been a part of saving many children’s lives. There’s a thread that ties tightly to every story I’ve felt these past ten years, and that thread is Robyn.

Love is a choice, we’re told. I had no idea what that meant the first time I said the words to her, at the base of the Snoqualmie Waterfalls. I knew I cared for her, and I knew she was a beauty, and I knew this was fun. But I had no idea what it feels like to experience tragedy. I had no idea the loss she would face, holding me tight, the two days I can remember, burned in my mind in perfect clarity as long as I live, as we held our sons and knew they were here no longer. Or the way it feels to break apart, in rushing landslides of loss and in glacial, terrible hurt and question while you try to make since of the thing that has happened. Luckily, I suppose, boredom and monotony have never been our crosses to bear.

There is no “fair,” as we know it, and our life hasn’t been “fair.” What has been ripped from my wife is not right, and I have cried nearly as many tears as she has, seeing the way it has broken her.

She is mine. I choose to love her, and she me, and it is often easy, and often not. I am selfish and foolish. I am broken. She encourages me when I am doubtful or weary. Sometimes, we have both been unable to hold each other up, and so we only hold on to each other, knowing there is strength found in weakness, knowing God holds us when we can’t hold each other. In the worst times in our minds, at least hoping that’s the case.

Outside right now, there’s a Florida summer storm battering down on our home. But inside, I can hear Robyn’s voice echoing as she and Leah laugh. And I feel the pressure on my eyes and blurry edges of vision as tears don’t quite appear, hoping our hearts are the inside of this home and our scarred lion’s skin is the exterior. We have been battered, and we have stood, bowed like a tree to the hurricane in more sense than one.

I look at or think of Robyn and smile. I am proud of the woman she is. I am honored to know she’s proud of the man I am. I know her weaknesses, and she knows mine. We have seen our brokenness and chosen to love deeper in those places, pushing bitterness from our minds, chasing away that jaded feeling that gnaws at us the more we learn of the world. Our son is stubborn and joyful, sharing my lighthearted approach to many things, and her fierce tenacity. Robyn feels guilty when she thinks of herself first (although I encourage her, and help, to create space where that’s precisely what she does).

She is rare, and beautiful, and a bit scary, and I am drawn to her now more than I ever have been. 10 years is a beginning. I love you Robyn Matthews – let’s do some more.

if you read to the end of this post, you get two bonuses… an original song of mine, and a worship cover

I haven’t written as much lately. We’ve had a shaky last 18 months, and I’ve felt… well, unrested.

But not in an “I’m really tired” way. It’s been more of an anxiousness.

When I was a teenager and in my early 20s, I had this misplaced pride in the “fact” I never got stressed. Of course it wasn’t true, but as I look back at it, there was something to it. I had an average middle class set of issues, and of course I felt them all with the depth a young musician does. Since I was 15 years old, though, I’ve rested in my faith in God. Circumstances sometimes sucked, but I believed, deeply, I was loved by God. At the core of me, I knew joy and peace.

And I grew up, and my sons died. Two of them, in one year, 2010. I married a beautiful and ferociously caring woman, I watched her find herself as a mother, and I watched that ripped from her hands while neither of us could do a thing about it.

So my questions got bigger and scarier, and affected who I was in a deeper way. For a couple years, I just drifted, I think stunned that this had happened. Charley was hooked up to a bunch of tubes for the first year of his life, and it was hard for me to connect to him emotionally even the year after that.

I never lost my anchor of this core thought of God being real, and us all being loved by Him, personally, including me. I’m sure the line attaching me to that anchor grew taut, though, as I floated around. An anchored boat can still drift; just not as far.

The last 18 months. We’d gotten to a point we were starting to feel we could be happy again, and we were excited, in 2013 and 2014. We adopted Charles, and he joined us in October of 2014. But it was a mess. Charles had a hard and unfair life. And a lot of that came out when he was in our home, and not in a therapeutic, “let’s work out our crap” kind of way. It tore all of us up even more, and neither Charles nor ourselves ever felt peace at home. Since June of last year, he’s been in a residential treatment facility. I talk to him often, and visited him recently.

Getting to the point where Charles left was hell on all of us. Home wasn’t peaceful. It was tense, dangerous, and we were all dialed to 11 all the time. Making the decision to have Charles move where he is now was hard, but absolutely the right decision.

There was some PTSD involved there, and we were… shaky. Shaken? Our foundation felt less strong, and we were tired. Through that, we started a new business, which didn’t really go in the direction we hoped. Life felt shaky. People told us we were strong, heroes, inspirational, but we were broken and hurting. I noticed both Robyn and I were constantly anxious and tense. Because we were so physically consumed by everything going on, we felt we’d lost much of our community.

To today. Or, this week. I’ve been thinking about that confidence I felt as a younger man, in God’s love. The rest I felt in knowing that. In Matthew 11:28, we’re told “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest.” I read a great talk by Charles Spurgeon on this passage. He mentions this rest is a rest of many things – rest of the conscience, rest of the heart, rest of the soul, rest of the entire being. I’d forgotten this, or at least I’d left that rest. I’d allowed the core of me to be unrested, and I don’t mean in the positive way that drives you to change terrible or unjust things. I mean in the way that makes you feel unsure of your direction, of whether the heart of it all is good, and of whether the point of it all carries worth.

I wrote the song below in 2008, with some help from Larry Wiezycki. This week, I’ve been listening to it and working to restore a core of rest. I still am incensed by injustice – I hope more now than ever before. I am even more passionate about the work we are doing, and driven to push it further and faster. But I used to do all that centered in peace, sure of my direction, precise and driven. I’m re-building that.

Today, I found a video from shortly after Ezra died, of me singing at church with a vulnerable and long intro at the beginning. It’s below. I’d encourage you to watch it, at least the talk. I meant the words I said, of God being our strength and joy. Of finding rest in the fact He calls us sons and daughters. There’s a lot of peace there as you research it.

I don’t understand why my sons died. I don’t understand why my wife must carry that, in a way even deeper than I do. Or why our fourth son is forced to carry the weight he does, and the effects it had on all of us. But I want to remain in that peace that I had for so long, and I need to say that. I need to put time into it, and I need to point my family to that same place.

I am more skeptical of so much now that I have seen more of the tragedy in the world, and how terribly all of us broken people treat each other. But I’d like to be less jaded. I’d like to keep seeing that you’re just like me, wanting peace and rest, and wanting to stand against anything that takes those away from anyone. I’d like to be more genuine and dogged in my search of God’s heart. I’d like to be more intentional again about building our community. None of this is good without caring, passionate people around you. And I think, like the Great Gatsby, I’d like to be known as the single most hopeful person you’ve ever met. I’m tired of anything else.