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Tuesday's Trust
What Happened to Life-As-We-Once-Knew-It?
I trust that I will have what I need, but may lose all I now have.~My husband's words to me, reading from his journal written this morning...
My words today:
God is an interesting Economist. The day our child’s Life was saved, our lives (as we once knew them) ended...
I always knew at some level,
When any parents lose their child, their lives are “over.”
I guess I didn’t know the details of just how much their lives were over!
Everything is being challenged. My faith is being challenged. My view of work is being challenged. My relationship with others is being challenged. My relationship with family is being challenged. In the meantime, being self-employed is another challenge: how do you function as an owner of your own business/practice when facing all of these challenges? Even our work itself is being challenged—our type of work out of necessity will change as will the type of client with whom we can work—reflecting the nature of the new character we will become.
It is not that we cannot function. It is that we cannot seem to function in the way we once did.
It is not that we cannot function; it is actually that we are forced by severe circumstance, to function at a much deeper level than before, actually a more life-producing way than before.
Grief by necessity simplifies life; it clarifies life.
With limited energy, you have to define what is important, and what is not. The important gets addressed; the unimportant often gets discarded.
For instance, we may forego cleaning our house to the more important task of
Ø Working intimately with God to cleanse our souls, or
Ø Grieve our losses, or
Ø Discover our new after-child-loss identity, or
Ø Console other grieving parents, or
Ø Learn more about social-media connections on the internet, or
Ø Start a foundation in memory of our child, or
Ø Write our books, or
Ø Write in our blogs…
Yes, it is hard to function. We struggle daily to maintain our sanity, our emotional, and our physical health. Within the last two years, I have had an at-fault car accident, a bone-breaking bicycle wreck, and another bone-breaking incident within my own home. (And, by the way, none of which is alcohol-related!)
Spiritually, mentally, and emotionally, I struggle with intensive, complicated grief brought on after the death of my child and the concurrent post-traumatic stress over the terrorizing years before her death as well as after the sudden, violent death of our teenage baby girl.
So, as I say, God is an interesting Economist. The day our child’s Life was saved, in many ways our lives ended…
But what value can you put upon a child’s soul? There is nothing more valuable than my child’s soul. There is no sacrifice too great for my child’s soul.
If our lives (as we knew them) had to end so that her Life in Heaven could begin, so be it!
Breaking that down into a nuts-and-bolts, day-to-day acceptance of reality is difficult; indeed, it is a walk of faith in/dependence upon our Lord. But, isn’t that what all Christians are called to do? Yes, but perhaps other Christians feel they have a choice of whether or not to obey.
We, Valley-of-the-Shadow-of-Death people have no choice; to survive death, we must walk the Way of Life.
God have mercy on us as daily You teach us to accept our sacrifice (take up our cross) even as we embrace Your Gift of Life to our child. Even as You taught Your own Son, please teach us to keep our eyes on the Gift, not on the cost...
(See Hebrews 12:2)
So, as I say, God is an interesting Economist...
The day our child’s Life was saved, our lives ended…or, did our deeper, more Life-producing lives just begin?
Can we trust God’s faithfulness to us as we obey Him by taking up our cross of grief?
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