PSA for Perimenopausal Women (and any woman who suffers from PMS)

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by Elizabeth

For the last several months I have had the worst PMS of my life. I was irritable, I was argumentative, and I didn’t want to be around anyone. I just wanted to be left alone – possibly for the rest of my life.

I tried reigning in my feelings of rage, but I was only ever partly successful, and then only in the first half of my cycle. Once I hit ovulation mid-cycle, I somehow couldn’t control my reactions. I would fly off the handle at the least little thing. My husband would offend me, and I would refuse to reconcile. I rejected all the normal things he might try to do to bring peace and resolution back to our relationship. 

At several points during this period of time, Jonathan mentioned that he would like to see a marriage counselor, maybe for an intensive, to try to bring some warmth back into our relationship. This should have been a warning sign for me, but for reasons I’ll discuss down below, I was too self-focused and couldn’t see the yellow light for what it was.

I know this isn’t the experience of every marriage, but our relationship has always been pretty easy going. We enjoy each other’s company, and we love to get away by ourselves, whether for just a walk or coffee date or something longer like a weekend away from the kids. Those things have been part of the rhythm of our marriage forever. So this was a huge shift in our relationship. Unseen tectonic plates slipped under the pressure, the ground quaked beneath us, and we had a hard time finding our footing.

But it wasn’t just my husband who was driving me crazy. My kids were driving me crazy too. I never wanted to be around them either. And just as I knew in my head that my husband was the best human I would ever find and that I wanted to stay married to him forever – even though most of the time I couldn’t stand being around him – I knew that my kids were legitimately good kids. They didn’t have major issues. They’ve always been easy to love, and I have enjoyed mothering them. But now their mere existence was driving me bonkers.

I had read about perimenopause; I thought my symptoms might be from erratic and/or dropping estrogen levels. I assumed I would just have to weather these symptoms for the next 10 years or so, until actual menopause arrived. I had spoken with enough women to understand that after the hormone levels drop at menopause, emotions are much easier to regulate, and mood swings finally settle down. I thought back to the years I nursed babies, remembering how calm, stable, and happy I was during lactational amenorrhea, and I looked forward to the final endpoint of menstruation.

But I couldn’t understand why God would make women so vulnerable and unstable during this time of life, a time of life that often coincides with raising teenagers and launching young adults, all of whom have big emotional and psychological needs.

My mother didn’t appear to have a difficult menopause, at least from my perspective. There was no strange personality change, no loss of affection. No yelling or flying off the handle. I myself had had an easy puberty, and in general I was happy during pregnancy, though I tended to be more anxious. I even did well postpartum, when many women struggle with the drastic hormone drop after birth.

So what was wrong with me? Why was I having such a difficult time with perimenopause? My mom did fine, why couldn’t I? I tried googling “wanting to be alone in menopause,” but all I could find were articles about how women were lonely and didn’t want to be alone.

And let me tell you, I was doing all the right things. I was exercising. I was eating right. I was journaling and being grateful. I was trying to connect with my husband. I was part of a vibrant church community, and I was praying and speaking with a spiritual director. I was working hard to listen to the voice to God, to center myself and remain calm. But all the things that had always brought me peace and tranquility in the past would work for maybe 10 minutes, then the happiness would evaporate and I would be just as unhappy as I had been before my intervention.

So finally, after about four or five months of extreme irritability and more fights with my husband than I’d ever had (although after most of them, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you what we’d been fighting about, the fights were that petty), I called the midwife. I couldn’t get in for a while, but I knew I needed help, and I felt relieved to know that help was coming.

As soon as the nurse checked me in, I unloaded on her. She empathized and assured me that my midwife would help. “She gets everyone balanced out eventually, it just takes a while sometimes.” That slice of hope was everything.

When the midwife walked in the room, I unloaded everything on her again, and she said, “It’s probably the progesterone pills.” She explained that what I had been experiencing qualified as PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder). It’s not just your garden-variety PMS; the mood swings are extreme and super hard to control.

At first I was so confused that I didn’t know what to say. I’d been taking oral micronized progesterone (bioidentical progesterone) since last summer to control the heavy periods of perimenopause. And it had helped. I was so happy with the menstrual improvement that I probably didn’t notice my increased irritability the first several months.

But looking back, I think my husband did notice right away. He couldn’t get me to appreciate beauty on our walks. He felt an emotional disconnection that he couldn’t put into words and that I couldn’t comprehend. I had been working hard on my faith, which had been in tatters during the pandemic and re-entry, and I’d been working hard on my relationship with finances, which had never been great and which had been deeply triggered in early 2023 due to a complicated combination of events. I felt so satisfied with my growth in the areas of faith and finances that I was unable to see the losses in other areas of my life.

Neither of us had any idea I could be reacting to a prescribed medication.

It took a moment to absorb what the midwife was telling me and to begin to make new plans with her. As this is an unfolding story and I don’t yet know if our plans will work long term or whether we’ll need to try something else, I won’t be discussing that part of the story at this time.

I went home and told my husband that the midwife just turned my world upside down but that we had a plan. The more I thought about what she said, though, the more it made sense, and the more I realized that I had walked into that office as a blinking red light for progesterone sensitivity.

So let me back up and explain progesterone sensitivity (or progesterone intolerance). This concept can be hard to swallow, because in both the natural and conventional medical worlds, progesterone is touted as a cure-all for sleep, anxiety, and heavy periods. In the natural health world, everyone is afraid of “estrogen dominance” – which isn’t even a medical term – and promotes progesterone as the solution to all menstrual woes, including PMS.

And there is some truth to this. Progesterone can help with heavy periods. It helps you sleep. (I personally slept great while I was taking it.) Progesterone is protective against uterine cancer, and according to Dr. Mary Claire Haver, it appears to be somewhat protective against breast cancer as well. But although progesterone has a great safety profile, it has some serious side effects for some women, including PMDD. And that’s the dark side of progesterone that not everyone knows.

Initially I had no framework for what my midwife was saying, even though I had read a lot on perimenopause and menopause. And I can be somewhat skeptical, so I went home and, true to my Enneagram 5 nature, went digging for information. What I discovered was that doctors do know about progesterone intolerance, but it’s not advertised much in some circles and is downplayed in others. After all, it’s estimated that only 10% to 20% of women have progesterone intolerance. Most women are just fine. 

But one out of five women sounds like a lot of women to me, and it’s a whole lot if you are one of those women. And it makes total sense that progesterone could cause problems. Any woman would tell you that the week between her cycle and ovulation is her favorite week. She feels great and has lots of energy. 

At this time, you have some estrogen but no progesterone because progesterone is only released by the corpus luteum after ovulation. That lovely period of time is actually a time of true “estrogen dominance,” as your body is producing estrogen only. You’ve got no progesterone. It’s only after ovulation, when progesterone is released, that women have issues with PMS, whether that’s physical issues like bloating and cravings or emotional symptoms like anxiety and irritability.

I wasn’t ready for the heavy periods that were sure to come if I stopped taking the progesterone, but I did anyway. Some physical symptoms were alleviated right away. I hadn’t been paying much attention to my physical symptoms because the emotional symptoms had been so difficult to deal with, but I was struggling with constipation, which I’d only ever experienced in pregnancy and postpartum. I also had headaches, itchy ears, dizziness, a feeling of increased pressure in my body and in my head, and increasingly swollen ankles – the kind you only get in pregnancy. 

In fact, at one point I was convinced I might be pregnant – even though I knew that was impossible. I had painful gas and an acid stomach, which I only ever experienced in early pregnancy and which necessitated lying down after dinner most nights, but over the next week those digestive discomforts slowly went away.

It took a little longer to experience release from the emotional symptoms, but soon I was easy to live with once again. I didn’t yell at Jonathan for everything he did. I didn’t tell my children to leave me alone. I looked out at the yard and smiled. I went to get the mail and got stuck on the driveway staring at those strikingly strange clouds hanging in that lovely sunset. Beauty could once again lift my spirits.

Food even started to taste good again. It had never tasted bad, I just wasn’t receiving much enjoyment from it. I didn’t realize this until one night after supper when I was eating some dark chocolate, as is my custom. Apparently I started murmuring about how good it was, and my daughter told me I hadn’t done that in a long time. Then one morning soon after, I ate my normal breakfast and stated how delicious it was. Because it was delicious (cue the Little Brute Family). Food continues to be enjoyable, thank the Lord.

Unprompted, I started kissing my baby girls. Turns out, they needed some love. It had been missing from our home for a long time. My husband gets more hugs, and so do I. He can tell me something I did wrong, and I won’t turn and attack him over it. I enjoy spending time with him again, and he enjoys spending time with me. We don’t need to go to a marriage intensive – which is probably a good thing for a marriage counselor. I just needed to quit taking progesterone.

I couldn’t believe how good I felt, and my family couldn’t believe how different I was. My children had their old mother back, and my husband had his old wife back, and it was all just so mind-boggling. So I did another deep dive into hormones to make more sense of what I was experiencing, and I found some interesting tidbits.

According to Dr. Lisa Mosconi (a neurologist who uses brain scans to study the changes to the female brain during perimenopause and menopause), puberty, pregnancy, and perimenopause are vulnerable times in a woman’s life. A lot of brain remodeling is happening in each of those seasons. 

Mosconi explains that the best predictors of how you will handle perimenopause and menopause are the past: pregnancy and puberty. That’s part of why I was so frustrated with my intense mood swings – except for the increased anxiety I experienced during each pregnancy, puberty and pregnancy were relatively easy for me. 

But there was more to the story than that. I did have one difficult pregnancy. I had severe acid stomach, but what was worse than that was my mood. I hated everybody during this pregnancy, which made ministry rather difficult. As soon as I delivered, I literally leaned back in the bed and breathed out, “I think I can love people again.” 

I thought my extreme irritability was due to the hormonal interplay of carrying a girl instead of a boy, but the next time I was pregnant with a girl, my emotions were even-keeled. I was always mystified by this until I learned about the effects of high progesterone. Suddenly the lights went on: I’d had a hard time getting pregnant with my third child and had had to use progesterone to get pregnant. I was not a nice person to live with that year.

According to Dr. Mary Claire Haver, board-certified Ob-Gyn, we experience a mini perimenopause each month of our cycles as the ratio of estrogen to progesterone changes and we feel what equates to an estrogen dip due to the rise of progesterone. Our estrogen feels lower, relatively speaking, and therefore whatever symptoms we feel premenstrually are likely to be magnified during perimenopause. For me, that’s irritability, rage, and anxiety. 

Dr. Mosconi says the brain experiences changes early, before a woman’s periods change. And changes to the menstrual cycle can come as early as a woman’s late 30s (they did for me). This made me wonder if my troubles with yeast infections and OCD were related to the hormonal changes of perimenopause, but I can’t know for sure. I do know that the anxiety caused enough suffering on its own. And I have heard multiple menopause doctors explain that for many women, the first sign of perimenopause is an increase in anxiety – either the onset of new anxiety or the worsening of already existing anxiety.

All of this information is highly interesting, but it isn’t inconsequential. My family suffered deeply when my progesterone levels were high. My maternal love just disappeared, and my kids wondered what happened to their nice mommy. My husband thought I’d left him, emotionally speaking, possibly forever – which was a double whammy after wondering if I’d disappeared forever into OCD-brain in 2019. 

The good news is, the wicked witch of the west isn’t the real me. The bad news is, my family still had to live with that cranky woman for eight or nine months. Clearly not every woman does great on progesterone, and I’m one of those women. I just wish people talked about this more.

Because it matters deeply. Our hormones are integrally connected with our faith. This year on Easter, we sang “Because He lives, I can face tomorrow . . . and life is worth the living just because He lives.” But it’s hard to believe those Easter truths when your neurotransmitters are off. God wants to connect with us in our minds, but it’s hard to do that when your internal chemistry has deviated from the original created order.

I’m so thankful for my midwife. She gave me back my marriage and my family, and six Trotters will be forever grateful.

Sources:
Estrogen and Brain Health (interview with Dr. Lisa Mosconi) 
The Wisdom of the Menopause Brain (Dr. Aviva Romm interviews Dr. Lisa Mosconi) 
How to Lose Belly Fat, Sleep Better, and Stop Suffering Now (interview with Dr. Mary Claire Haver)
Mary Claire’s YouTube channel
Dr. Barbara Taylor’s YouTube channel

The Table {Postcards from Re-entry}

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by Elizabeth

In 2006 when our lead minister and his wife became empty nesters and moved out of the church parsonage so that we could move in, they left their kitchen table. We were a young family who didn’t have a kitchen table and were grateful for all the other furniture they left too.

Over the next six years, our family grew around that table. We added babies, and we added memories. We created a family and ministry culture around that table, and when we left the States for Cambodia, my best friend took the table into her home. 

It was full of memories for her too. Memories of late-night conversations when she would visit me because I was stuck at home with young children and a traveling husband. (I now try to return the favor to young moms when I can, going to them during naptime.) It was full of summer days with our kids eating snacks around the table and then playing in the yard or doing science projects together. She had to let me go, but she didn’t have to let that table go.

A new kitchen table was one of the first things we needed to find when we arrived in Phnom Penh in 2012. Some friends took us to a local furniture shop and helped us pick out both dining and living room furniture. The pieces were cheap, but they looked good enough.

Our first table soon fell apart. Huge flying termites bored holes into the table and migrated into our door frames as well. We could hear them chewing away at the wood. Jonathan tried to tear out the rotten pieces and kill the termites, but eventually he gave up the struggle. The table had to go. Its cheap, untreated wood had probably brought the termites with it from the shop in the first place. Next time we would be more careful.

In the meantime, we needed something to eat from, so we pulled out a spare metal round table, the kind that Khmer people set up at weddings. It took up a lot of space in our kitchen, but we discovered we liked the equanimity of a round table. Everyone could participate in family life the same. We were all the same distance from each other, and family life thrived. We decided our next table needed to be round.

Eventually we found a super heavy, high quality Khmer round table, and it took several delivery men to pull it up the two flights of stairs to our kitchen. We couldn’t host people around that table very well, but we couldn’t host people very well around our rectangular table either. Our kitchen was just too small.

We loved that round table. You can see it in lots of family photographs from our time in Southeast Asia. It became emblematic of Trotter family life, and after a few years we all signed our names under our places at the table.

Then covid happened. We returned to America early for a planned furlough, leaving our table and other belongings behind like usual. When we realized we weren’t going back, Jonathan did everything he could to rescue our Cambodian kitchen table, that centerpiece of family life. After multiple failed attempts with one company, we found a legitimate company that could transport our most precious belongings back to the States. It consisted mostly of books, pictures, and personal items, but we also shipped the table. 

The shipment took several months, getting stuck in U.S. customs and requiring unexpected fees, but it eventually found its way to Joplin, where we were resettling. We pulled our heavy Cambodian table into our new home in December 2020 and breathed a sigh of relief that we had preserved part of our children’s childhood for them.

But it took up a lot of space here as well as there, and after a couple years Jonathan started dreaming about a table that could host more people. We weren’t engaging in much hospitality during the pandemic, but he knew he wanted to host people again. He wanted to live like we did at the parsonage, regularly inviting people into our home and our backyard. He wanted to live like he did growing up on an acreage in a small Kansas City suburb, where his parents frequently hosted people for evening bonfires, sunrise services, and hot cocoa. To do that, we would need a different table.

The family wasn’t sure how to take this news. We loved our round table. It reminded us of Cambodia. But I caught the vision. I knew he was right – we needed a different table if we wanted to invite people into our home and into our lives. But tables are expensive, and we needed everyone to get used to this new plan, so the idea sat for a year or two.

All along, he kept an eye out for wooden tables and benches (which seat even more people than chairs). Then one Saturday morning he saw a friend selling wooden benches online. He texted right away, explaining that he was looking for benches to go along with the long kitchen table he was still dreaming of.

She said they still had the table that went with the benches, the table they had raised their family around. The table they had invited dozens of people to over the years. This table had a heart for ministry. It had a legacy. Its owners decided to gift it to us.

And what a gift it was. To know that this table had seen years of love and care and fellowship, years of laughter and soul secrets and tears. And to know that we were receiving such an incredible heritage from these generous people so that we could do the same thing they had done, the thing we had been dreaming about doing again, was such a sweet gift from the Father. 

So we rearranged our kitchen to welcome this new table, which came with two benches and two extensions for larger groups. Daily life doesn’t require the extensions, but we can already envision our married children and grandchildren gathering around this table someday.  

Our Cambodia table still has a place in this new arrangement. We cut off both leaves, along with the rolling feet, and set this reduced mass in an open area near our kitchen. Now we have a place to put food and utensils when we host people, since our kitchen has next-to-no counter space. And this is getting into the geometry of it (which I find fascinating, though you might not), but a round table maximizes circumference (which is why it took up too much floor space in our kitchen) while minimizing surface area (which is why there was no room on the table for food). This new table solved all of our problems at once.

A few weeks later we got a taste of this new way of living. We tried out the arrangement with guests, and it worked splendidly. Everyone could relax comfortably, the kitchen didn’t get overcrowded, and we could all eat whenever we wanted. Our home feels like it’s meant to feel – open and warm and clear, and most definitely ready for guests.

Into the Shadow — Reflections on Totality

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by Elizabeth

It was so wildly beautiful it couldn’t possibly be real. A brilliant ring of light in the sky should fill in, not fan out. My mortal mind simply couldn’t comprehend it. I had longed for this day for years. I grieved hard in 2017 when I missed the total solar eclipse so many other Americans witnessed. And it was then that I planned to watch the one on April 8, 2024.

We drove past the midline of the eclipse clear to the other side, where we were just barely inside the path of totality and where dear relatives welcomed us into their home. I do not claim to understand how prayer works, but I am not ashamed to admit I prayed for clear skies. No matter how far our technology progresses, we humans are still beholden to the weather for the most spectacular sight on earth.

The week before the eclipse, the weather looked to be cloudy that day. I didn’t hold too tightly to my dream of seeing and experiencing totality. I didn’t want to be disappointed. Even in 2017 when I started making plans for the 2024 eclipse, I knew that Arkansas skies have about a 50% chance of clouds in April.

But as the days went on, forecasts changed from cloudy to partly cloudy and then, the day before the eclipse, to sunny. The morning of the eclipse, a bright yellow orb hung in a clear blue sky with only a few cirrus clouds floating by. I cried all morning, unable to believe that God might actually give me a chance to see this fantastic event.

Seriously, I cried all morning.

After lunch I walked onto the deck and searched the sky for first contact. We put on music and sunscreen and played in the backyard, intermittently observing the sun through our eclipse glasses. I wore sunglasses at first because it was so bright outside, but at one point someone pointed out how much darker it was getting. We probably only had about 70% coverage, but the light was already changing. Everything was greener, more muted, a little bit eerie. I no longer needed those sunglasses.

As the moon moved farther across the disk of the sun, the temperature started to drop, and I actually put my sweater back on. After eight years in Southeast Asia, I’m particularly sensitive to cold, and I didn’t want to risk being distracted by the chill during totality. I watched through eclipse glasses as a sliver of orange light got thinner and thinner and shorter and shorter until it disappeared. 

Suddenly everything went black, and I took off my glasses. The corona wasn’t anything like I had expected from photos. It was feathery and delicate, but also crystalline, not as diffuse as in the pictures. It was much whiter, much brighter, and much purer than I had expected. 

It spread out unevenly and much farther than I had imagined, and I didn’t know what to do with those little pinpricks of starlight I saw at the bottom and on the sides of the crown. At first I thought they might be Bailey’s beads, but they were on the wrong side of the sun for that, and they remained for the entire duration of totality. Later I learned they were prominences, courtesy of the sun’s 11-year maximum for solar activity. 

Totality wasn’t as dark as night, which surprised me. Though the sky near the corona was a deep shade of purple blue I’d never seen before, all around me was only as dark as dusk. Not your normal everyday lopsided dusk where one side of the sky darkens first, leaving coral pink and terra cotta on the other side, but a dimness all around. We swam in twilight as the shadow of the moon raced across the surface of the earth. 

I looked for Jupiter and Venus, in line with the sun in the middle of the day. Venus was to the right (west), closer and bigger, while Jupiter lay to the left (east), a bit smaller and farther from the sun. I looked around the horizon, expecting the 360-degree sunset I’d read about, but to the east I saw a small patch of light blue, where the other side of the city wasn’t in totality. 

I went back to gazing at the corona for the rest of the eclipse, but all too soon it was over. As soon as it ended, I was sad. I wanted to whisper, “Come back,” wanted to hold onto it like a perfect dream you’re not ready to quit when the sun rises in the morning. My daughter told me she could see the disappointment on my face.

In the immediate aftermath, it was like the eclipse had never happened. The sun came back out, and it was soon warm again. And even though I had stared at the moon’s obscuration of the sun for most of the two minutes and 20 seconds of totality we had, I couldn’t remember what it looked like. I remembered Venus and Jupiter; I’d seen them before. They looked the same. I remembered the nearly 360-degree sunset. But I’ve seen sunsets before. My brain knows what to do with an orange glow along the horizon. The white fingers spreading out from a dark hole in the sky – that’s what my brain couldn’t understand. 

It was whiter than the full moon, much whiter than the sun should be, and yet it was the sun, not the moon. It stretched out so far, much farther than I’d expected. And all those sparkling pearls on the surface – what were they?! I saw at least five. Only later did I understand those bright drops of light, some larger than others. I wish I’d known at the time what I was seeing. I might have been able to catalog it better.

At first I felt like I had somehow done the eclipse wrong. But when I talked with my kids, they felt the same way. It was hard to remember the actual event. Two minutes is not very long to take in something that you’ve never seen before. Even if you’ve read a lot of eclipse material like me.

I love the moon. I’ve been watching her all my life. We are intimate friends, she and I. But even as an obsessive moon watcher, I still can’t wait to catch another glimpse each time the moon turns full. Watching me, you might think I’d never seen it before, though I have – a thousand times. So of course I would find it difficult to remember two minutes of moon shadow.

We waited for the moon’s last kiss of the sun and piled back into our car. The memories kept slipping through my mind as we drove. I couldn’t catch or hold them. I had wanted this for so long, and it was disappearing right in front of me. I had looked at the planets once or twice, I had looked at the horizon once or twice, but mostly I had stared at that glowing orb in the sky. Why was that bright wreath going dark in my mind? Why couldn’t I touch the glory?

I wanted to hold it in my hand. I wanted something sure and steady. I’d dreamed about this day for so long, I needed more than what I’d been given. Like Philip in John 14, my heart told the Lord, “Show me the eclipse, and that will be enough for me.”

But it wasn’t enough. It didn’t satisfy. It only made me homesick for heaven. I caught a glimpse of God’s glory, yet the moment soon passed. The sun returned and life went on. The glory had moved on, and though I saw it from a distance, I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t keep it. God’s glory is slippery, totality is brief, and just like that the corona evaporated before my eyes.

The eclipse transported me to another dimension, but like so many experiences of awe, it was fleeting. Every sunset, though beautiful, though common, is fleeting. Once the sun slips below the horizon, the sunset is gone, and you’ll never see another one like it. God’s glory is ephemeral, and we can never quite touch it. 

So is this chasing, this longing, this remembrance of His glory, the closest we get to God? Can we catch an infinite God with our finite hands? Would we even want a Lord like that? Is it better to worship a God who only gives us glimpses, who asks us to be satisfied with almost, who allows us just a sideways glance? 

Am I content with a God who only shows me His back? Can I embrace this mysterious distant presence? Can I love a God I’m always on the verge of losing? Each time I hear from Him, there’s a certain not-knowingness, a small amount of doubt that I actually heard from God – just as I doubted that I saw the sun’s outer atmosphere that day. 

My frantic search for internet photos later that night was really just a desire to confirm what I saw. I wanted photographic evidence that April 8th was real. But I couldn’t find a photo that truly captured what I saw that day. An eclipsed star is more sparkly and twinkly than the photos, more delicate and threadlike. Brighter and bigger. There was something wrong with every photo I found, something not quite like what I saw. 

And so my solution was to see another eclipse. That way I would know what I experienced was real, that it actually happened. But even if I watch another solar eclipse some day (and I’m already planning for 2045), it won’t look the same. The sun won’t be at solar maximum. Earth’s weather won’t be the same. Every eclipse is different, just like every sunset is different.

I would have to accept the mystery of the eclipse, the way I have to accept the mystery of a sunrise, mundane as it is. Every celestial event is fleeting in its own way. I remember how quickly the Christmas conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn sank below the horizon.

The next morning I woke up and had a difficult time getting started on work. All I wanted to do was ponder the eclipse. All I wanted to do was relive it in my mind over and over and over again. What’s the point of achieving things when we could just sit around all day and watch eclipses? 

But that’s exactly the point. We can’t sit around all day watching eclipses. They’re too rare. God doesn’t show us His glory like that all the time. Most days are filled with a lot of menial tasks. We have to work. We have to clean. We have to care for others. 

But can the memory of glorious moments keep us company our whole lives long? Can they be a down payment for heaven, a reminder that we did indeed experience the Creator God?

In the days since the eclipse I’ve searched the sky for the colors of that day. I watch the dark part of the sky in the east as the sun sets in the west and think of that day. I gaze at the whiteness of the moon as it soars overhead at bedtime and think of that day.

I wake up in the morning and look at the sky and thank God. If it’s cloudy, I thank God that He parted the clouds for me on April 8th. If it’s sunny, I thank God that he gave us clear, blue skies. Day or night, clear or cloudy, I look toward the heavens and thank God for granting me a glimpse of His glory.

The eclipse reminded me what a beautiful sky we have been given. It reminded me how miraculous each day and night truly are. We turn to the light, and then we turn away, and God paints the sky with every degree we turn.

Now, two weeks later, my brain has finally started to settle down. I can keep myself from inserting eclipse awe into every conversation. I still watch stray YouTube videos of the eclipse now and then, but I can focus on work and school and family life. I look at the photos and videos we have of that day and am thankful for the evidence that the experience was real. 

But mostly I’m thankful that God answered the long-held prayer of an astronomy-obsessed girl to see His glory. And for now, that is enough.

The Trotters41 Podcast is moving!

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Just wanted to thank you all for following the Trotters41 podcast and invite you to hop on over to the new Digging in the Dirt podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

We’ll be wrapping up here with this episode, and all new content will be over at Digging in the Dirt. In the future, we do hope to include more regular content, as well as more discussions between us both. Thanks for listening in!

If you’d like to check out the book, Digging in the Dirt, you can do that on Amazon here. [Affiliate link helps support the work of A Life Overseas.]

Have a great day, and God bless!

Jonathan T.

A New Podcast: Digging in the Dirt, with Jonathan Trotter

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Listen to the Digging in the Dirt podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify!

Here are the show notes from Episode 1:

Welcome to the inaugural episode of the Digging in the Dirt Podcast! I’m so glad you’re here! I will aim to keep this short, simple, and from the heart. Over time, I plan to read through my entire book, Digging in the Dirt. Think of it as a sort of free audio book! And in addition to the readings, each episode will feature discussions around listener-submitted questions.

So, where would you like to begin? You can submit your ideas, comments, and questions for future episodes here.

Listen to Episode 1 on on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or right here.

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great day!

~ Jonathan T.

www.seeingtheheartsofthehurting.com

________________________________________________

Resources Mentioned

Necessary Endings, by Henry Cloud

Digging in the Dirt, by Jonathan Trotter

I Walked On the Moon, by Brian Regan (YouTube comedy special)

*Amazon affiliate links help support the work of A Life Overseas