Making Lemonade from Life’s Lemons
LEMONS TO LEMONADE
Three weeks before her first wedding anniversary, Mattie lost her husband, Ben, to a sudden traumatic brain injury. It was Labor Day weekend in 2018 when Mattie and Ben went to Palm Beach, Florida with friends. They had been on a dinner cruise and returned to the dock. As Ben was helping some friends up the stairs, he slipped on some steps and crashed back onto the concrete dock.
He lay unconscious for a moment, but then opened his eyes. Some off duty EMTs encouraged Mattie to take Ben to the hospital. The impact of the fall caused his brain to swell significantly and a craniotomy was performed so he could maintain brain function. He remained in a medically induced coma for eleven days. During that time, he had multiple strokes and eventually became brain dead. When he took his last breath Mattie was devastated. They had been married for only 49 weeks.
When you lose someone you love, Mattie says you have three choices: (1) Blame God and turn from your faith; (2) Deny the pain, or (3) Be honest about how betrayed you feel by God and choose to trust Him anyway. “When life gives us lemons only a long grueling process can turn them into lemonade,” shares Mattie.
It is a painful process, but you are at God’s mercy, His plan and His timing. She relates the grief process that she has been through over the past several years to how the disciples must of felt on crucification Friday. They were grieving and lost - just how she felt when Ben died, but soon the disciples realized He never really abandoned them. Through the grieving process, she reminds herself that God has not forsaken her and that lemons on Friday will turn to lemonade on Sunday.
GRIEVING PROCESS
On the outside everyone praised Mattie for how well she was handling her grief, but on the inside, she felt like a fraud. She knew the nights she had yelled at her family for no reason, the nights she drank herself to sleep because she was too afraid to lie in their bed alone, or all the people she avoided or lied to because she felt too depleted to talk.
Her deep, unprocessed pain was “coming out sideways,” according to her therapist. Her grief had even ransomed her memory. During a therapy session they talked about how neither God nor Ben would be disappointed in how she grieved. Grace for herself and from others was essential as she worked through the process.
Mattie felt a huge relief. That day she surrendered and told the Lord she accepted she couldn’t endure grieving Ben in her own strength, but that with Jesus’ power and grace she could. Later that day, beautiful memories that were once frozen in her mind because of the trauma began to replay like a slideshow. It took Mattie surrendering and admitting that she could not endure the grieving in her own strength to remove a mental barrier. When she began to stand on the truth that only Jesus could restore and resurrect her heart and her life into something new, something stronger than before, she started to live again.
As you go through difficult seasons, Mattie suggests the following ways to help you on your journey to healing:
• Strengthen your roots – spend time with Jesus in hard and easy seasons. “I have never felt more reliant on God and more rooted in Him than I do today,” shares Mattie.
• Talk to Jesus. Don’t overthink it. Prayer is a gift of communication and connection with God.
• Let your mess be your message – share your testimony to encourage and bring healing to others.
ADJUSTING YOUR VISION
After Ben’s death, friends and family approached Mattie with detailed dreams about Ben. They were so encouraging to her and all delivered the message, Ben is home and safe with the Lord. Mattie pled with God to give her a vision of Ben at peace with Jesus. She wanted to see the joy he was basking in. She also studied heaven to get a glimpse of what he might be experiencing.
Months went by and God had not answered her request. Finally, a few days before Christmas that year, Mattie received her gift. In the dream Ben and Mattie talked, he was in nature with animals and Jesus, and even picked up a yellow lab with a red collar just like the one they had bought months prior to the accident.
One interesting part of the dream Mattie recalls is seeing Ben (without a shirt) with stripes on his back. In the hospital Ben had experienced physical trauma. His body was marked with IV holes and staples lined his skull from two brain surgeries. As she looked at the stripes on Ben’s body it became clear that he was covered in Christ, justified in His image, and now glorified in His presence. He literally had become the righteousness of God. This dream changed her vision. “I was no longer fixated on an image where life is dark and I’m a widow but one where the darkness I can’t change is side by side with the light of the Savior who changes everything.”
NASHEVILLE
The City of Nashville has been the stage for nearly every chapter of Mattie’s life, both in childhood and adulthood. “Growing up in a country music family,” she says the gene for writing and storytelling led her to a BA in Creative Writing from University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Her dad, Alan Jackson, told her, “You’ve got a gift, sugar, but you haven’t lived life yet; go find something you want to write about.”
For six years she worked in the food and wine industry, but retired in 2018 when she felt the Lord calling her elsewhere. He opened up a new opportunity for her. She is now the co-founder of a women’s philanthropic apparel brand, NaSHEville, where the proceeds of products support serving orphans, widows, and trafficked women. The primary partners are: Love One International, End Slavery Middle Tennessee, and the Modern Widows Club.
Just six weeks before NaSHEville was launched, Ben died. Her purpose and place with NaSHEville has never been more clear, more complete. “I am here to walk with all those who have lost husbands, lost love. I am here to un-isolate, un-stigmatize, and rewrite what our lives as widows can and will be again if we are vulnerable with each other and resting in the God that heals what seems un-healable. I am here to share stories of all the women in Nashville; from loss to gain, from struggle to success. We all have a story, and very likely, one that if it were shared, could turn another SHE’S story from broken to beautiful,” shares Mattie.
