Category: Life

Life

Grieving and Sermons on Friendship

Taia Jo

Do you have those days where you wake up excited just knowing in your heart it’s going to be a good day and then something happens that catches you off guard and crushes your excited spirit.  That was me today.  Despite waking up late I got ready in record speed and was in just a wonderful mood and so excited to start the day by serving at church this morning.  Even as I was walking into the volunteer meeting I was greeted by a very friendly (and stylish) woman who was also racing in and was so warm and welcoming to me despite not even knowing me.  The morning volunteer meeting had concluded and I’m going over my role as the online host for the live stream for Mercy Road Anderson.  I was still feeling so good and decided to check my phone and turn it on do not disturb as the countdown for service was happening.  That’s when I saw it, one of my friends of almost 15 years had passed away.  My heart sank, I felt like I was going to pass out and thought there was no way this could be real life, I had to be dreaming.  

As I was holding back tears I remembered I had a job to do and had to continue going over things for the role I was serving today.  The worship portion of service ends and that’s when I realize that Pastor Mark’s sermon is on friendship.  My heart sank once again and I had to work even harder to not burst into a ball of tears in the production room in front of all of these (very kind and welcoming) men who do not know me at all.  I started to get upset because of all the days to serve, I have to serve after hearing this news AND sit through a sermon on friendship.  I knew that was not the right attitude to have while serving others at church so I used all my skills of disassociating I’ve gained the last 33 years and pushed through to focus on the task at hand.  (Side note: I’m not saying that was the healthiest approach either but I was in survival mode and had to do what I had to do at that very moment.)

Once the first service ended I felt like I could breathe a little and then remembered I had to also be the online host for the second service and my heart once again sank.  I couldn’t imagine sitting through this sermon again and this time without a co host sitting with me going over everything.  Again, I wrestled with why today? Why this topic? Today was supposed to be a good day.  Since I did not have a co host for the second service I REALLY had to pay attention to properly interact with those watching the live stream.  I again wrestled with not wanting to have to sit through and listen to this message a second time and how I just wanted to go home and cry on my golden retriever.

As I’m sitting through the second service though I actually had a huge change of heart.  I wasn’t disassociating but leaning in to my feelings (but not so much that I start bawling my eyes out.)  I realized that God still worked out all of this perfectly because he knew what the day was going to hold for me.  I started to think how I wouldn’t have been able to push through today if my day started off terrible and I started thinking about the impact that could have negatively had on the service today.  I knew if I wasn’t serving today I would have walked out of service the moment I knew it was on friendship because I would have told myself I couldn’t handle that sermon today.  I wouldn’t have experienced the revelation that this is just another way God meets us where we are, and we are capable of so much when we put our trust and our heartaches into his hands.

The first verse that was mentioned was one of my favorites and that was Proverbs 17:17 which reads “A friend loves at all times.”  This is a verse that even my non church going friends try to live by when it comes to friendships because it holds so much truth with so much simplicity.  I began to reflect on my sweet friend and how she truly lived this verse to the fullest with every single one of her friends.  Pastor Mark began to talk about how true friends love you through the good and the bad, they don’t let things like difference in opinion, race or political affiliations get in the way.  That made me smile because that was Heather’s whole outlook on friendship.  If you were a good person, and truly loved others she didn’t care about differences in opinion or political beliefs or religious/spiritual beliefs because she knew if you lead with love you were a good person at your core and someone she wanted to be surrounded by.  This moment brought so much peace and comfort to my hurting heart knowing I had a friend who was the core example of this.

Pastor Mark also said something that really stood out to me and that was that a friend doesn’t run away when trouble comes, they LEAN in.  Although I knew what this meant, God really spoke to me in a different way today.  When I was upset I was serving and couldn’t run out of service when it was on friendship I realized that I was not being a good friend and not properly processing and honoring my friendship with Heather.  God was calling me to lean into the pain and the grief today, so I could allow a space to feel peace and comfort knowing how blessed I was to call her a friend these last 15ish years. 

I’m still not sure where my head is at in processing the news of Heather’s passing.  What I do know is that God used the sermon today to bring me comfort and remind me what type of friend I want to strive to be.  A friend more like Heather who no matter what obstacles she faced, led with love, and set the example of what a friend is supposed to be.  I also am so incredibly thankful to go to a church where the pastor leans in to sermons God is laying on his heart and uses God’s voice as a guide to speak to his congregation.

Tonight I am left processing, grieving and cherishing the memories and conversations I’ve had with Heather over the years.  I am also remembering to let my friends know how much I cherish them and am challenging myself to become the best friend I can be in 2025.  I have some areas I need to improve and probably should try to take Pastor Mark’s advice on learning to just sit with my friends as Job’s friends did in his time of need and not always give my opinion and ”tough love first” approach.  My friends who I am close with realllllly know what I am saying in that last sentence.

If you get nothing else from reading this blog please remember this next part. Grief is a weird thing and we all handle/process grief differently. There isn’t a right way or a wrong way to grieve. There isn’t a timetable of grief despite us trying to give ourselves one. There are things I will find comfort in my grieving process that others would never even look to, and vice versa. Grief impacts us all differently and that is okay. Today I needed to be at church serving a bigger purpose in the infancy of my grief, I needed to hear a sermon that was on friendship and very hard at times for me to listen to, and I needed to have lunch with my family afterwards to be surrounded by love. I needed to take that 3.5 mile hike at mounds to connect with nature and a peace only nature can bring, while feeling the comfort from my pup. I needed to come home and organize and deep clean my kitchen to give myself a sense of order and control and I needed to write about the whole process of events today so I can continue to process my grief tomorrow in a healthy way.

To my dear friend Heather,

Please know you have greatly impacted my life and left a permanent mark on my heart.  I will always strive to love as genuinely and as boldly as you did.  I will strive to always live in fierce strength and resilience just as you did, no matter how hard or how many times life knocks me down.  I hope you are at peace and I pray you know how loved you were on this side of earth and that you know just how many people you positively impacted.  The world is truly hurting without your presence and if anything positive can come from such tragedy I hope it is that we all strive to be compassionate, resilient, loving humans just like you.

Life

All Too Well

Taia Jo

Earlier this week I was doing a 60 minute cardio set to a Taylor Swift playlist.  For this set you are supposed to build up your pace for the first 40ish minutes and then once “All Too Well (10 minute version)” you go to a running pace.  At first I thought this was a weird running song because it’s sad and slow, however I went with it because that was part of the set and I like to follow the rules.

If you’ve heard this song I am sure it affects you like it does for most people.  It sends memories flooding back of a former romance that just left you permanently scarred.  As I was at that 40 minute point in this cardio set (attempting) to run I started to have various visuals popping up.  I started to think of “that romance” that truly took several (and I mean SEVERAL) years to be completely healed from, I also started thinking of old friendships that are no longer.  As I was running it was like I could literally see several screens playing various moments in my life that left those deep scars that took so long to heal.

While more of these screen visuals were presenting themselves I found myself getting frustrated and trying to run faster by increasing my treadmill speed to break those images from my view.  I truly felt like I was the subject in a music video for the song because those visuals of my life on the screens were so vivid.  I became incredibly out of breath, decided to slow down and just lean into this sensation because maybe God was trying to show me something.  Which, when you stop long enough to say that, the thought barely finishes before God makes his message known.  

Although I truly (and finally) feel at peace with those various scenarios being replayed, I realized just how exhausting it was holding on to those hurts all those years.  No matter how fast I would try to run from them in my life, just like running on the treadmill I would be stuck exhausted and running in place, getting nowhere fast.  Once I learned to let go and heal from those things, my growth took off.  I did not feel stuck in a rut or in that never ending cycle of bad things happening that I felt like I could never truly break.  When I let go I was actually able to see what those situations were able to teach me.  Most importantly, when I learned to let go of hurts I felt a weight lifted off of me.

Now, I only get that “exhausted” feeling when I have been focusing on myself and the areas of my life and/or relationships I can improve in.  However, it is a different type of exhausted, it’s rewarding, not draining or discouraging.  I really hope we can all learn to remember those hurts “All Too Well” without getting stuck living in said hurts.

When we fixate on those hurts and choose to live in them, it allows those hurts to dictate our lives.  By dictating our lives, it determines how we grow or if we will stay in that rut of hurt.  It’s okay and important to feel the hurts and lean into those hurts so we can one day reflect on them.  After all, there is no growth without pain, but there is also no growth when we let ourselves live in the constant playback of said pain.  Don’t allow your life to become a constant playback of hurt, running in the same place worn down and exhausted.

Life

2023: The year of letting go

Taia Jo

Wow it’s been a minute.

As much as I love blogging, and using social media to blog, I took a huge step back last year.  I needed to focus on rediscovering myself and my passions in life.  By doing so I traveled to many states, got on a plane for the first time in twenty years, saw the desert for the first time, fell in love with hiking, focused on my mental and physical health and started taking classes for paralegal studies.

As 2022 was coming to an end I really felt like God was telling me that the theme for 2023 would be “letting go”.  I, like many people, do not like change.  I also love to think I can control everything and everyone in my life.  I really wrestled with this and tried to ignore it and searched for anything else that God could be telling me but the words letting go always came back.  I honestly wasn’t too thrilled about already knowing what my challenge and a huge part of my growth for 2023 would be.

To be honest I kept myself up at night wrestling with this reality and God wasted absolutely no time in starting this growth period for me.  On January first I was sitting in church and 4 questions were asked but two hit me like a ton of bricks.

  1. Who do you need to let go of?
  2. What is a habit you need to break?

Both resonating with letting go but in different ways, and with very prominent situations in my life.  In 2022 I tried SO hard to hang on to friendships that were no longer serving a purpose in my life because “they have been such a good friend for so long”.  I also had various ideas in my head on how I felt certain situations needed to go and I clung on tightly to those ideas and tried to manipulate those situations to prove my ideas were the best ideas.  I genuinely let go of a few people/situations and they came flooding back into my life, further making me believe that letting go and not being in control were not necessary.  

January first was not just the start of the new year but the start of my journey of letting go.  The first three days of January were full of situations where I knew God was slapping me across the head and saying it was time and I could no longer lie to myself that I could control the situations and people that were included, including situations that do not even directly involve me but I still feel an obligation to try to control.  A lot of tears were shed and a lot of questioning God and his plan followed.  God wasted no time and honestly I was so overwhelmed with it all happening literally day one, I just did not understand why God would do that to me knowing how hard of a lesson this was going to be for me.

After those first few days I honestly isolated myself and just tried to sort through my thoughts and feelings.  I spent a lot of time in the gym and focused on easing myself into letting go of emotional situations and focused on physical things.  I went to my closet and got rid of 5 large bags of clothes and instead of fear or sadness I felt freedom.  Then it hit me, if I can feel freedom from letting go of physical things weighing me down and cluttering my life, what can happen if I let go of friendships, situations, and relationships that are weighing me down because I am trying to control them.  Getting rid of physical things in my life made the emotional stuff I was identifying to let go seem a lot less scary.  Once I was able to get rid of 5 bags of clothing I felt the urge to start decluttering other things.  Book shelves, knick knacks, text books and I still have so much to go through.  I realized that letting go doesn’t have to be a heartbreaking experience, increase my anxiety to unhealthy levels or be associated with a bad situation.

I can’t control everything and everyone, I cannot control every aspect of my life because life does not work that way.  What I can do instead, is focus on the freedom I feel when I take a situation out of my hands and give it to God.  The freedom of trying to put a friendship in a certain box that I feel it fits in.  The freedom of accepting certain relationships for what they are and not focusing on controlling the relationship for what I want it to be.  Letting go of situations my friends are in and realizing I cannot force them to get out of the situation or see it for what it is.  

So, if you are like me and really struggle with letting go, I encourage you to dig deep and embrace the idea of letting go.  It is not an easy task and I do not want to downplay it as this is something I have struggled with since highschool.  What I can promise you is that after the tears fall, the dust settles, and you adjust to your life learning to be okay to not be in control you really will feel a whole new type of freedom that you have not felt before.  

I am always here for any of you, strangers or friends if you find yourself in this same place and need someone to talk or cry to.  Letting go can feel lonely at times but please know, you are not alone.

Life

30=Lonely

Taia Jo

I’ve had a lot on my mind lately and I haven’t blogged in a while.  I’ve been doing some journaling but haven’t publicly written anything so I thought maybe I need to share and whoever needs to read this will see it.  I turned 30 in August and I was very nervous about it leading up to it.  Everyone told me 30 is a blast and I will love my 30’s.  If we are being honest I have not enjoyed 30 at all, it’s been a very hard year emotionally and it’s not even over yet.  I’m hopeful the rest of my 30’s will be better and maybe this first year in my 30’s is preparing me for a wonderful decade but right now I hate it.  

30 has by far been the LONELIEST year I’ve lived so far.  Adult friendships are hard to navigate because we are all on different schedules but if we are being honest, I don’t even feel like that’s the main issue.  My friends and I are all in very different places in our lives and it shows.  I genuinely feel like my time and place in all of my friendships is no longer warranted or needed.  I feel incredibly alone in my life and I don’t know how to break past that.  My friends are always too busy to make plans with me yet can always make plans with their couple friends, work friends etc.  I feel like every friend in my life I have to pull their teeth to spend time with me and something still comes up that they bail last minute.  I have always been very blessed with amazing friends but 30 has completely flipped that upside down.  Between having a need to feel like I have to take care of everyone, and always tending to isolate myself when I’m not in a good place mentally I have had a very hard time accepting this reality.  I’m not married nor do I have a boyfriend, I don’t have kids, I don’t have roommates so I am very much alone with my dogs.  Don’t get me wrong I like living alone but this is the first time in my life I feel truly lonely.  

I know for a fact if I didn’t text my friends to even attempt to hang out with them, they wouldn’t even notice that I hadn’t been around.  Let me tell y’all that is a VERY hard pill to swallow.  I’ve always struggled with not letting people know when I need them or need help and I will say this has just made that worse.  How do you not fall into those unhealthy habits when you truly feel you only have yourself and you aren’t needed in anyone’s life?  Obviously I’m counting my family out of this, I am very blessed to have a family that loves me and never misses an opportunity to tell each other we love them.

I don’t know how to move past this, or accept this stage in life, I truly don’t.  I have cried more at the age of 30 than I can ever recall.  I’m just praying that I have a change of heart and can be okay with this and find a way to enjoy my 30’s.  I keep telling myself this won’t last forever and maybe God will place friends in my life that need my friendship as much as I need theirs.  I miss feeling like I belong and I don’t know how to get that back, but maybe I’m not supposed to.  Adult friendships are a million times harder but effort has to be put in on both sides to make it work.

I hope that my friends know I love them and they will always have a place in my life, even if I don’t have one in theirs.  I am just really struggling with this season of life and I pray God brings some friends in my life soon because I cannot handle the loneliness much longer and I fear I will just shut everyone out to protect myself.  I truly hope nobody else is feeling this way in life.  However if you are, please know you aren’t alone and my heart truly hurts for yours.  If you are very confident in your friend group and know where you belong do not take that for granted.  Show your friends your appreciation for them and never make them feel like they aren’t important in your life.

Who knew 30 would equal loneliness?  I can tell you I did not.         

Life

Remembering 9/11

Taia Jo

Speechless.  I think for the past 20 years that is where most of us have stayed.  Every year, another anniversary of 9/11, another year realizing we are still in a war over it and another year realizing that moment in history forever changed us.  Not just as individuals, but as a country as well.  I think for so many of us the only way to know how to continue to process is to talk about where we were when we found out about the twin towers and ask others the details they remember of that day.  After 20 years, I’m not sure I’ve fully processed things, but I think after 20 years it is time to try.

I remember I was living in Anniston, Alabama, I was slowly walking into the living room as I was just waking up for the day to eat breakfast and start my homeschooling.  I walked into the living room where we had navy wall paper, maroon crown molding and this ugly boxy coach with tan velvet and dark brown 70’s style squares we had covered up with a navy couch cover.  I remember seeing my family looking at the tv as I went and sat on that little couch.  My cousins were over at our house and as I’m yawning watching the tv with them I don’t fully understand what’s going on.  When my mom explained that planes crashed into the world trade center, I knew that had to be bad but I still didn’t quite understand.  I was barely 10 years old, so I was old enough to know it was bad news but not old enough to really understand the magnitude of this.

As we continued to watch the news I remembered George W. Bush addressing the nation, and addressing that we would be going to war.  To a 10 year old war is not something that could possibly be happening.  It was in the history books, my American Girl books, in the days of my great grandparents who served but not something my generation would experience and see.  As I’m sitting there processing everything, as my family is processing everything..we get a knock on the door from a police officer.  He explains that there is a bomb threat on an Amtrak train that is on a route that will be passing through the railroad tracks right behind our house and our neighborhood needed to evacuate.  So here I am 10 years old processing what a terrorist attack is, the country I live in going to war, and now we have to leave our “safe space”, our home because of a bomb threat.  I knew at 10 years old there was evil in the world however, it was not until 9/11 I realized how deeply evil this world could be.

So we couldn’t be home, and no public place felt safe.  So many bomb threats in the world, all the hijackings, we really had no place to go.  So we drove, and we drove, and we drove and ended up in Georgia.  I remember while we were driving around aimlessly genuinely thinking that was the day we were going to die. That a plane was going to crash into the road we were on, or that a terrorist attack would occur in the south and we would be caught in the middle of it.  I was 100% convinced I was not going to see the next day and I don’t think I really told my family about the things I was feeling.  I had experienced fear in the past but this was the first time I had felt real, intense fear.  

I remember at the age of 10 being scared that nobody will ever want to be a police officer or a fireman or an EMT or join the military again.  Who would want to be a first responder and have to potentially experience such a traumatic event?  How would anyone in their right mind WILLINGLY sign up to join a military that is actively at war knowing they will have to go overseas?  I was so scared about the what ifs, that this moment would result in people no longer wanting to sign up for these jobs and as a result we would have no protection, nobody to help keep us safe and that if nobody joined the military the war would escalate and terrorists would run our country.  At 10 years old, this was all a lot to process.

Sometimes I think 9/11 was the beginning of my anxiety problems, my need to control everything, my uneasiness in big crowds and maybe even a little bit about my mild fear of heights.  If I can control everything, I don’t have to experience fear or uncertainty, everything around me is safe and I can feel comfort.  If I avoid big crowds I don’t need to have a narrative in the back of my mind thinking this would be the perfect opportunity for another terrorist to attack our country, I don’t have to worry that at any moment someone could come in and blow the whole place up.  If I stay close to the ground I don’t have to worry about trying to get out of a collapsing building or be trapped in an elevator as tragedy is about to occur.   If people like me who just watched it on tv have these lingering thoughts, and fears..can you imagine the people who had to actually live through it or witness it in person?

I read something today about an individual whose picture has circulated so much her photo is known as “dust lady”.  It mentioned that even though she survived the terrorist attack, essentially she lost her life that day. This individual understandably developed PTSD, regularly had nightmares Bin Laden was hunting her down, flashbacks of the event and she began to self medicate with alcohol and drugs.  The photo also said that it was not until she learned Bin Laden was killed that she entered rehab and got clean,  finally living a somewhat normal life, until she died of cancer in 2015.  They said the cancer was most likely due to what she inhaled on 9/11.  Can you imagine living through what happened, living through calling your loved ones on the airplane or being in the surrounding buildings watching the plane knowing it’s going to crash and you can’t do anything about it.  I think we need to remember the survivors of 9/11, the people who experienced a literal hell on earth and have to sort through that for the rest of their lives.  So often I feel they are forgotten, it’s not to discredit the physical lives that were lost but they did lose life as they knew it that day.

The days that followed 9/11 are also something I’ll never forget.  I remember we couldn’t find American flags anywhere, I remember strangers helping strangers, people talking to each one another randomly in public (now I lived in the south so when I say this I mean more than usual).  It was like America as a whole exemplified what it means to come together and unify after a tragedy.  When we could have been scared of strangers we were befriending them and helping them.  When we saw people hurting, we were helping them.  We were showing our support for our country, our first responders and truly understood what it meant to be united.  I think so many of us feel incredibly blessed to have lived through that specific aftermath of 9/11.  We weren’t fighting over red and blue, we weren’t fighting about war or police brutality or what the leader that didn’t get elected would have done.  Instead we came together as a country, we leaned on each other, and we were ready to do what we needed to do to help our country and our people.  I honestly don’t think we will ever see that type of unity again, but I am so thankful I got to experience that.  It has shaped me and my political beliefs a lot as an adult.

20 years remembering 9/11 and I am proud to say those fears of that 10 year old little girl have been diminished.  I have been so blessed to have so many friends and family fill those roles I thought nobody would want to fill.  To see people take what occurred on 9/11 and say “this day was the day I was called to serve my country”.  To see people continue to enlist when there has been a war going on for 2/3rds of my life.  I will always love and appreciate the heroes I personally know in my life, especially knowing they chose to fill these roles even though they watched 9/11 occur on their tv’s just like I did.  To have firefighters, soldiers, EMTs and police officers in my life is truly an honor.  These friends and family members will never really know how much I look up to them.

20 years.  20 years to process.  20 years of still being speechless.  20 years of still trying to move past this.  May we never forget the event that occurred, the lives that were lost, the first responders, the survivors and the importance of united we stand.