Moments with Marri

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

  Grit.     That word lingered in my mind yesterday morning after Jason’s sermon on Psalm 42 on Sunday.     The mornings are the toughest time of the day since Haddy went Home for me.     So, as you can imagine, the morning of the 4th of July is humbling.     I laid on my air mattress in my tent here at the campground, listened to nature, and wept again.     I weep for my boy and for all of the subsequent losses and pain so intricately tied to his death.     I thought about the book of Habakkuk, the wrestling lament of a prophet given to us for the good in it.     There it came again.     Grit.     Our faith is pretty gritty, the Hampton kiddos and parents alike.     We aren’t pulling up our bootstraps and telling each other, “suck it up buttercup.”     We aren’t avoiding.     We are messy, wrestling, and fighting for joy and happiness in the Lord and with each other.     Yesterday looked like that.    We played so hard!    I took almost no pictures.    The reception is terrible here a