Traveling this road.....

I am not alone.....there are so many others on this journey that Eric & I have found ourselves on.  Thankfully, some of them have written books and I can benefit from their experiences.  It helps to know someone else has found themselves in the muck and the mire of loss, others have asked the same questions I am asking, feeling the same things I'm feeling and having similar struggles.  I guess I'm living out 'misery loves company".  It's not about wanting to make others around you miserable but having the reassurance that others have traveled this road before you and survived it and how can I make decisions that will make me better not bitter.

I just finished a wonderful book by Jerry Sittser entitled "A Grace Disguised" that has helped tremendously.  It makes sense!  He gets it!  Here are just some of the quotes that impacted me and things that have helped me:

On recovering from a catastrophic loss:  "catastrophic loss by definition precludes recovery.  It will transform us or destroy us, but it will never leave us the same.  Whatever the future is, it will, and must, include the pain of the past with it.  Sorrow never entirely leaves the soul of those who have suffered a severe loss.  Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.  Deep sorrow often has the effect of stripping life of pretense, vanity and waste.  Suffering can lead to a simpler life, less cluttered with non essentials."  Suffering a tremendous loss stripes your beliefs down to the root; you re-examine everything you have believed and thought was true.  I have to start with what I know and for the longest time I didn't know anything anymore.  "Drown out what you know of God and you will drown in sin."*  My grief was drowning out what I knew of God so I had to really think, what do I know about God.  The only thing I could start with was, I know God loves me. I know, even though my perception is that I am alone in this, that I can not feel or hear or perceive God around me, He is here in the muck and the mire with me.   I haven't gotten much further than that; there's still so much I am having to re-discover.

"The most important thing you will ever think, is what you think about God"*  I have had to re-examine what I think about God and I vacillate daily, hourly on how I think of God now.  For those who define God's sovereignty as absolute, taking that to it's extreme would mean that God didn't just allow Ian to get cancer, He didn't just allow Ian to die - He killed Ian.  My biggest struggle has been how do I reconcile the God that I know loves me with a God who would kill my son and the pain that would bring?  And just telling me that 'God is sovereign', like it's some kind of healing salve doesn't help me.  It doesn't reconcile these two extremes in my mind.

I have always believed that in between two versions of a story is most often, the truth.  I think the same can be said on how we view God.  In between the extreme belief that God's sovereignty  means that we are mere puppets in this play called life and the belief that God sits back and has no control over the things happening to us and around us, probably lies the truth.  I don't think having the gift of choice in our life (i.e., will I believe in God or not, will I follow this path or that one?) negates God's sovereignty.  I think He is big enough for both.  Just because we may not be able to understand how those two things work together shows our limitations not God's.

Do I trust God with all my heart?  No.  My heart is not just bruised, it's shattered.  It's like Humpty Dumpty, I don't think you can put all the pieces back together.  I'm sure some pieces have gone missing and I'll never find them again.  But I also believe, I know, that in time God can heal this broken heart.

"The scenery of my life is different now, as different as the desert is from the mountains.  But it can still be beautiful, as beautiful as the desert at dusk."  I never liked the desert; I couldn't see the beauty of it, not until I went to Navajo.  Then I saw the beauty of it's bare peaks and red earth.  I don't know if I'll be able to look back on my life and see it as beautiful but I have the hope that when my life is over and God shows me the tapestry that was my life, I will weep at the beauty of all of it - the happy, the sad, the highs and the lows, the gains and the losses.

"Finally, we reach the point where we begin to search for a new life, one that depends less on circumstances and more on the depth of our souls."  I love this!  I am just beginning this search.  I'm not only grieving the loss of my son but who I was and how I looked at life.  My belief that God will step in and save the day is gone. God doesn't always save the day but the day that has crumbled into the abyss is not eternity.  I have eternity to look forward to.  "Now life will be a little less sweeter, death a little less bitter."

"Even the saddest things can become, once we have made peace with them, a source of wisdom and strength for the journey that still lies ahead".  Frederick Buechner

They say that regret is an unavoidable result of loss and at times I have regrets about how we treated Ian's cancer - should we have hit it harder when it returned, should we have made that trip to Cancer Treatment Centers of America but I have no regrets about my relationship with Ian.  I have no regrets about the time we spent together, really talking; about how many times we exchanged 'I love you's", about showing him how much I valued him.....he left this world KNOWING he was loved and would be missed.....I have no regrets about that.  The time spent with him was a blessing.

"We cannot change the situation, but we can allow the situation to change us."  There is no way to avoid this; I will be different.  My hope, my prayer is that I will be better, not bitter.

* recent sermon titles by my pastor, Benji Magness.