The word I had questioned only hours earlier had become our next destination, and this time we pulled into town with the camper still attached.
There would be no campground setup first. No exploring. No making things comfortable.
I needed medical help.
By the time I sat across from the urgent care doctor, I was exhausted, dehydrated, and in pain. I explained the sores in my mouth and the wounds that had developed on my lady parts.
Her concern immediately turned toward sexually transmitted infections.
I understood why the symptoms raised the question, but I also knew my marriage. There had been no infidelity.
So there I sat, trying to convince a doctor I'd never met that the wounds on my unmentionables had appeared two days after a drunken night of particularly rough intimacy time with my husband.
Talk about humbling.
I knew how ridiculous the explanation probably sounded when paired with sores covering the inside of my mouth. Those I couldn't explain.
Neither could she.
What neither of us knew was how much stress my body had been carrying beneath the surface. And it hadn't begun on this trip.
There were wounds underneath these wounds - work, marriage, fear, faith and questions about my own discernment that I didn't yet have words for. I had been carrying far more than what we'd packed into that little camper.
She could only see what was visible.
Sores in my mouth.
Open wounds on my unmentionables.
And from what she could see, she pursued what seemed like an obvious possibility.
But there was an entire story underneath those symptoms that neither of us was looking at yet.
Despite my insistence that there hadn't been infidelity in our marriage, testing meant painfully scraping areas that were already raw and tender.
And that's when another story walked into the room with me.
This wasn't my first time sitting across from a medical professional discussing STD testing.
Seven years earlier, I hadn't been able to say with confidence that infidelity wasn't possible.
I knew it had happened.
That Jenny had sat in another doctor's office after discovering her husband's affair, carrying the humiliation of having to explain why she needed to be tested.
And suddenly, somewhere in Tennessee seven years later, I was being asked to pick up a piece of that story again.
Only this time, something was different.
I could remember her.
I could remember the betrayal.
I could remember what it felt like to sit in that room and have my marriage reduced to questions on a medical form that I never imagined I'd have to answer.
But I wasn't her anymore.
The memory hurt, but it didn't pull me back inside of it.
What happened in 2016 was part of my story, but somewhere along the road of healing, it had stopped being part of my identity.
The scar had marked me.
It had not become me.
The doctor treated what she could see. I was given medication for the infection and a strong topical lidocaine that finally numbed enough of the pain to make using the restroom bearable.
And it helped.
I began drinking again. My body started receiving the fluids I had been withholding from it, and by the following day, I could already feel a difference.
The visible wounds were beginning to heal.
The root underneath them, however, was something medication couldn't touch.
I didn't understand that yet.
For now, relief was enough.
By the time we pulled into our campground in Tennessee, I had something I hadn't had when we arrived in Kentucky.
Relief.
And maybe permission to stop surviving long enough to actually enjoy where I was.
Something else had changed too.
In Kentucky, I had spent so much of our setup trying to make the camper comfortable that I barely came out of it. I organized. I cleaned. I tweaked. I cooked. I provided.
I convinced myself I was taking care of my family while quietly hiding inside the little home I was creating for them.
But by Tennessee, most of that work had already been done.
Setup was quicker.
And this time, I came out of the camper.
I was still Mom. I still cooked and made sure everyone had what they needed. Those parts of me didn't disappear.
But I also got to be a wife.
A friend.
Me.
We explored the campground together. We spent time at the beach. We sat around a bonfire and made s'mores, enjoying the kind of simple evening I had pictured when we first dreamed about taking this trip.
Nothing spectacular happened.
And maybe that's exactly why I remember it.
After days of pain, uncertainty, hiding, and trying to hold everything together, ordinary felt like a gift.
Even the campground restrooms felt luxurious. Clean bathrooms and running water probably wouldn't make most people's vacation highlight reel, but after Kentucky, I was incredibly thankful for both.
I hadn't realized how badly I needed a reset until I finally received one.
For a little while, we stopped chasing.
We were simply together.
As I write this, I think about the man at the pool of Bethesda.
For thirty-eight years, his mat had been the place where he lay waiting to be healed. Then Jesus told him, "Get up! Pick up your mat and walk."
Jesus didn't tell him to burn the mat.
He told him to carry it.
The very thing that had once carried the man became something the healed man could carry himself.
Maybe that's part of what healing looks like.
It isn't forgetting.
It isn't pretending the painful chapters never happened.
It's being able to pick up the evidence of where you've been without lying back down on it.
That day in Tennessee, I had been handed an old piece of my mat.
Infidelity.
Betrayal.
The humiliation of STD testing.
But this time, I could carry the memory without allowing it to carry me.
Maybe that's why our stories are worth sharing.
We don't carry our mats so we can continue identifying with what happened there.
We carry them because sometimes the evidence of where we've been is the very thing that shows someone else how far God has brought us.
My body still had healing to do.
Apparently, our little camper still had some traveling to do too.
Because just as quickly as we'd settled into Tennessee, the weather began changing again.
The wind picked up.
The power went out.
Another storm was headed our direction.
Bonfires and s'mores had given us the reset I didn't know I needed, but our peaceful little stop was coming to an end.
This time, we pulled out the map and looked ahead for somewhere south of the storm's path.
One name caught my attention.
Pickensville, Alabama.
So we packed up our little home once again and headed toward the next place on the map.
We thought we were simply picking a safer place to spend a couple of nights.
We had no idea what was waiting for us there.
Companion Thought:
Healing doesn't erase the mat that once carried us. It gives us the strength to pick it up and
walk.