It’s been 3 hard years





Love my crew.  I haven’t posted much on this trip or written much either.  Maybe I just needed to disconnect?  From Haddy’s birthday on May 7th to the 4th of July, I feel like I’m trying to grip the wheel and hang on or something.  The world just feels different, darker.  It is, I suppose.  My view of it most certainly is.  I’m thankful the Lord uses every season and every reason to remind us of our need for Him.  I’m learning that my expectations don’t always need to be written in stone and that grief requires me to slow down way more than I’d like to admit and reassess those expectations.  

I look at these faces every day.  Man, I desperately want to do this thing well.  I can get fearful and fast for how far I feel in over my head.  ...yes, I know that’s dang near a ‘drowning’ reference.  Life, hardship, grief, anguish...it can feel like a whole lot..a whole lot of the time.  I suppose if there’s something I’m coming home with, it’s this; Hope doesn’t always equate to an outcome that I’ve deemed redemptive (ie: the absence of anxiety).  Hope seems most firmly felt in my hand and heart in conjunction with intimacy with the One who holds all of our tomorrows, good, bad, and ugly.  Hope sometimes means remembering to simply store up treasures in heaven with mundane obedience, dying to myself here in every painstaking moment of deep-seated anguish and angst and laying my life down for my people even when my heart still feels like it might fall right out of my chest.  Placing my hope in Jesus doesn’t require me to feel only gratitude as the sun shines on my face and the sound of the rushing waves work their wonder.  I’m allowed to also feel how frustrated the whole world feels because of death and sin, including my own.  I can fight to be given and grateful, dying to myself and thankful for what Jesus has done, and also angry because so many things are broken here.  My heart, it’s broken for sure, but there’s so much more unspoken broken.  This kind of grief opens my eyes to an entirely new realm of suffering and sin, not just my own.  I wear things differently.  Sometimes I feel like the kid who is beating my fists against the chest of God in fitful anguish.  Maybe it’s sin.  I don’t know.  I know I still hurt.  I want to offer up some sunshine, and I also just want to be honest.  

God IS faithful.  I am broken and constantly in need.  He never waivers nor hides from my fitful anguish, restless heart, or wandering ways.  He’s still whispering His Word into the recesses of my heart even when I’m still groaning 3 years into the hell of child loss.  

Do Your bidding Lord.  


Psalm 119:75-77

I know, O LORD, that your rules are righteous, and that in faithfulness you have afflicted me.  Let your steadfast love comfort me according to your promise to your servant. Let your mercy come to me, that I may live; for your law is my delight.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The story I never wanted to tell

This story is a hard one to tell.  I don't believe that I have to share it, but I also understand that many, many people have questions when a little one dies.  So, I will share it with the hope that your hearts will settle into the One who can lift up your soul.  I know that Haddy's death, whether you knew him or not, leaves a terribly unsettling feeling.  I want your heart to be nestled into the Father for such a time as this. July 4, 2018, my 38th birthday began with a plan.  Our dear friends, the Dickensons, asked us to go to the pool of a friend of theirs.  We love water.  We spend as much time as we can near or in it.  Both of our families had asked a few others to join us.  We got there around 1 p.m.  We played, we swam, we talked, we laughed.  It was incredibly tender and dear.  Our conversations were our normal.  We laugh, tease, play, but in an instant one of us may be talking about something deep and meaningful.  We talk with our children, all of them, from younges
Read more

A Whisper: Your Pain is Not Sovereign

Image
Art by Lydia Hampton The most valuable, sewn in through pain anchor of a whisper from my Lord this past year is this:   Your pain is not sovereign.    I am.   It has been whispered into the unspoken broken, over my broken body, and surrounding my aching, shattered heart.    God Himself measures the calamity that reaches my little world.    Don’t ever be fooled.    He’ll give you far more than you can handle.    Many conclude within the wreckage of anguish that this must mean He cannot be both sovereign and good.    In our utter groaning we feebly look for some way to calculate the incalculable.    We try to make sense of what seems completely insensible.    I couldn’t even attempt to guess the number of times I’ve replayed the treacherous, my brain trying to reconfigure what could have been or what I could have done differently to change the death of my son.    In the mystery of it all, I’ve had nowhere else to turn with even a glimpse of rest but Christ.    I cannot ultimately believe
Read more

Dare to Hope

I've been wrestling.  My son died 6 weeks ago.  Days have already turned into weeks.  Soon, weeks will turn into months, and months will turn into years.  So many people ask me, "How are you?"  I understand that the question is more like saying 'hello' to most.  It is simply a greeting.  It's just that this question forces me to confront my reality.  The answers I have rehearsed for years upon years don't suit me anymore.  My honest answers are too raw, too painful to expose in a simple greeting.  I see the kindness in the eyes of many who ask and I don't assume the worst.  Instead, I worry.  I worry that people may want my 'tour of grief' to end before it will.  I am not even certain that I have entirely accepted that my boy isn't coming home to me.  I mean, all of his clothes are folded and placed in his dresser and they don't appear in the laundry basket covered in spaghetti sauce, dirt, or peanut butter anymore.  Man, he loved peanu
Read more