Moments with Marri

What do you see on your fifth birthday love bug?    Do you see what I see?    Do you see our endurance, our gigantic love for you?    Do you feel the immensity of grief we experience as just consuming love?    Or are your days filled with sliding down a diplodocus neck squealing the entire trip down with delight, a blissful unawareness of all that we know now?    Are you memorizing Scripture as you dance to the jolliest tunes with the sound of glorious bagpipes that Knox so enjoys?    Or are you baking cakes with Grandma Hague and constantly tasting the batter?    Does the laughter of God shake the foundation of Heaven when you discover something new?    Are Lydia’s masterpieces covering the walls of a home you’ll show us around one day?    Is there another Hampton kiddo there a little older than your Calvin?    I imagined that dear one a girl with golden curls like Knox and the tender sa...

  The psalmist begins here with a journey through lament and into a distinct setting of sight on God’s character and beckoning for deliverance.   The psalm ends with praise.     If I’m honest, I’ve been weary of being weary for a long time.  My eyes are often dry and my mind can spin and spin.  The darkness is not merely the absence of light nor is bereavement marked by only sorrow.  I just keep doing the next thing.  I can preach truths to my own soul that still land on a heart that doesn’t always accept those truths stored up in my mind.  Sometimes I muscle through the very next thing, waiting on the sigh of relief or breath of fresh air, only for it to feel as the tiniest pip and trod on waiting for the next.     Darkness doesn’t always beget a redemption story at every turn around the bend.  Darkness is sometimes just dark.  I miss my kid and I struggle to let him linger in my mind in the space of sweet rememb...

This morning we were discussing laughter and humor over the wafting smell of bacon frying in our cast iron skillet.     Let’s just say it was a glorious moment in time.     I was reading funny Spurgeon quotes to Jason after a friend shared a quote this week that made my heart glad. “There are difficulties in everything except in eating pancakes.” I’ve said many times that laughter is good medicine.    Yet, laughter has often felt so difficult to come by.    There are so many aching realities within and surrounding us.    How could we welcome or indulge in laughter when our hearts are in agony?    Let’s be real, forcing laughter is phony, an evasive front without the provision of any real relief, but laughter does produce some mysteriously therapeutic wonderment within.   So how do we get there?    I am finding that looking outside of myself, staying there and lingering for a long while, can often produce lau...

Written earlier this week but too timid to post... The thought of his decaying body near Halloween troubles me terribly. I’ve pressed my body to the ground and wailed for the desire to be near to him was so great that I chose something so seemingly strange to lessen the anguish of his distance.  Insects crawling on my body only intensified the wailing from the depths of my soul.  How could this be my son surrounded by dirt and worms?  I have tucked him right into the crook of my neck to feel the warmth of his heavy breathing just as his little body gave way to rest.  I carried him in my body, nursed him at my breast soaking in the sounds of his satisfaction, and cleaned that pudgy little tush countless times.  I know all the different twinkles in his eye and what they mean.  Surely, this terrifying anguish is some altered reality that I can escape.  Yet, it’s not.  This is my lot to bear, the cross I have been given to carry.  In a sen...

Joy and sorrow together can make you feel uneven, disoriented. The last few days have been full of beauty and full of pain. The juxtaposition of joy and sorrow can feel like a perpetual tilt-a-whirl. For a little while you enjoy the ride and then you can’t decide which way is up and which way is down. I’m there now. This week my Knox described a PTSD flashback with surprising clarity in his own language at nearly eight. “It repeats,” he said. Through tears he explained, “I want to make it stop and I can’t. For some reason it’s always the same.” I was thankful for his description, affirmed him in his anxious grieving, and utterly covered in grief that my curly-haired jokester wears so much anguish. It’s humbling to hear my child describe those sorts of things. The images, the sounds are all strongly tied to quaking emotions. To watch him describe them would humble just about anyone. The depth of his anguish is a direct reflection of the depth of his love, no doubt. Tonight Calvin ran ...

I miss the mundane.    Diaper changes.    Poopscapades.    Wrestling the alligator that is a toddler boy with wild legs and ants in his pants.    I miss the tickling that I would do to prevent the fussing.    I miss grabbing his chunky thighs.    I miss his messy hair.    I even miss his fussing.    I miss his stinky feet.    I miss toddler stank after a day full of playing.    I miss his chaos and his noise.    I miss his messes.    I miss his naked butt running through the house after a bath.    I miss his fingers and his toes.    I miss the slight curve of his lips just before that great smile.    I miss his little button nose.    I miss his dirty little neck that I wiped down hundreds of times after a messy meal.    I miss how ticklish he was.    I miss the completely individual way we loved each othe...

My post from August 31, 2018... “Mornings have been the toughest for me on the whole since Haddy went to heaven. Our mornings were filled with his giggly excitement for the day.    That could include elbows, knees, and feet to any part of your body while he climbed into bed.    It could also include fussing if we hadn’t moved fast enough toward breakfast.    That boy loved helping in the kitchen and he loved scrambled eggs.    Overall, Haddy was filled with the sweetest, bubbly playfulness in the morning.    We truly delighted in him.    Jason and I both anguish that he isn’t with us.    We feel conflicted with everything that we do these days.    Our hearts and minds are flooded with so many questions and unknowns.    We are settled though that the truth of God’s character is as steady and true as it was before Haddy went to heaven.    We may feel conflicted but He is not.” ...