Moments with Marri

 Haddy’s fake fuss.  He wanted my phone.  I have survived immeasurable yearning for every mundane moment with him for more than 1,000 days.  The touch of his skin, the sound of his voice, the feel of his hand in mine, his disobedience, and all of the training required to bring a two year old to a five year old.  I wanted it all.  I am so jealous for him.  Still.  Time does not heal all wounds.  That is a lie.   For more than 1,000 days, I have been in the furnace of affliction, staring my greatest fear in the face with the challenge in front of me to still live, to offer myself to my children and my husband who all have great need.  Truly, I love them more than my own life. I’m here to tell you.   When you come to the end of yourself perpetually, there is a God who sees you.  His grip is unmistakably strong and gentle, loving and firm.  He knows suffering.  No amount of fiery anger, bitter weeping, or cursing the...

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 comi...

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 ...