Friday's Faith - What Did You Bring When You Came to "Minister" to Me?

Friday's Faith

What Did You Bring

When You Came

to "Minister" to Me?

When you came to visit me, what did you bring

To this mother with her child whose life is now at stake?

Tell me, what did you risk with your vain offering

To shoot the breeze, whine, laugh awhile - was this all a mistake?

Before you came, were you prayed up,

laid up,

cried out,

before God plied out?

Or winded from your errands,

self-imposed guilt trips,

keeping up your score card?

What did you really give of yourself that made this visit hard?

What did the woman bring to Jesus when she cried and brought perfume?

Do you think the fragrance of her love for Him might have filled that room?

Did you bring His love? Did you bring His concern?

Or were we just on your list of things to do, and your time to burn?

Did you bring genuine joy? Did you bring your tears?

Did you bring your heartfelt angst for our loss of all these years?

Why did my spirit then not feel nourished,

Ministered to, nurtured, nor tended inside

With reminders that my son's soul would always flourish

And that his Lord would always be by his side?

For when you never lovingly mentioned my Lord's name,

I had to wonder then, why was it that you came?

For while my precious boy's life was under the surgeon's knife,

Why did my heart weep inside just to have peace and quiet

For time before my God to mourn that yet another child might perish

While you, your jokes and quips that only you seemed to relish,

Harped on and on, and just wasted that sacred, precious time?

Did you really think it would be helpful simply to distract?

Was I supposed to be wowed by your distasteful act...

Did you bring a "role" that you simply played

Because, to be quite honest, my spirit felt splayed

As you bragged that in a hospital you could simply waltz right in,

The power of your "role" you bragged about, all to my chagrin.

To be quite frank, I didn't want you there;

I wanted a gentle Lamb, like my Savior, there

Who would cry with me over Satan's wiles

To hurt my child with his feckless guiles

To take a child, a new father, in his prime

To the edge of the brink, to look down into death's slime?

Did you think to mourn with me with reminders that God is here

Though we don't understand the whys as we shed each and ev'ry tear?

So, please, before you bring your next offering,

Please hear this mother's plaintive cry,

Ask Him first, what He would have you bring

To show the Suffering Servant's heart when next you do stop by.

For there is no ministry without suffering

When you properly reflect the Man of Sorrow, acquainted with grief,

Then His suffering love will be reflected in the poured-out offering,

Bringing the griever, Love Himself's heart of sweet relief.

You will find you'll no longer run from our suffering,

For the Savior ever draws near with His sweetest comforting.

*****

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed;

perplexed, but not driven to despair;

persecuted, but not forsaken;

struck down, but not destroyed;

always carrying in the body the death of Jesus,

so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies.

For we who live are always being given over to death for Jesus' sake,

so that the life of Jesus also may be manifested in our mortal flesh.

So death is at work in us, but life in you.

Therefore, having this ministry by the mercy of God,

we do not lose heart.

But we have renounced disgraceful, underhanded ways.

We refuse to practice cunning or to tamper with God's word,

but by the open statement of the truth we would

commend ourselves to everyone's conscience in the sight of God...

For what we proclaim is not ourselves,

but Jesus Christ as Lord,

with ourselves as your servants for Jesus' sake.

For God, who said,

"Let light shine out of darkness,"

has shone in our hearts

to give the light of the knowledge of

the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ.

But we have this treasure in jars of clay,

to show that the surpassing power belongs to God

and not to us.

2 Corinthians 4:8-12,1-2,5-7 (ESV)

Picture - Arcimboldo, Giuseppe (1527-1593) - 1590c.The Market Gardener

(ESV) *English Standard Version of The Holy Bible

Tuesday’s Trust - The Daffodil: Living in the Dark

Tuesday’s Trust

The Daffodil:

Living in the Dark

I look out upon my garden and see

The daffodil, sitting sprightly on ground

That once was dark, yet filled with mystery…

I look at my life, wondering where I’m bound,

Deeply ground under piles of death’s ashes.

Is there hope for new life for me as well?

All seems dark, yet Your Son shines through; flashes

Of Light break through the dark of death’s hell,

Urging me on through the dark to break through,

Reaching for Light, keep my eyes looking up,

Fight through the dark, keep my focus on You,

To hold on by Faith without giving up…

With the strength of Your hand, You pull me through

Much slower than I ever would have guessed.

Moving me slowly would build Faith’s sinew,

Breaking through fear-rocks and fighting doubt-pests

To strengthen my being for life anew,

Toughen me up for Satan’s stormy gusts

When Loss and Grief threaten to take me down…

Then suddenly through death’s dark dirt we bust

Where I see the Son shining with Light all ‘round…

http://images.flowers.vg/1024x768/daffodil.jpg

Poem – Living in the Dark – Angie B. Prince – 4/6/10

Tuesday's Trust - Can We Trust...Things Will Get Better?

A silent hug means a thousands words to the unhappy heart.

Tuesday's Trust

Can We Trust...Things Will Get Better?

The death of a child shakes our trust in the world at the most primal level.

We know the world is full of disorder and catastrophe but, for the most part, we count on things happening reliably in our daily lives. Then, that which is so integral to our lives that it seems almost our reason for being, is taken away, gone.

Our whole sense of ourselves is so disoriented and confused, the organizing patterns of our lives will not work anymore. Is it any wonder we “can’t believe it”?

~Matha Whitmore Hickman

***

Over the months and years we will learn to say it more calmly. Yet each time we say it—and we must, it is a part of our learning our own terrible truth—the heart will jump, the stomach contract, the tempo of the body will shift in acknowledgment: I had a child who died.

But there is little to help us. It is not expected in our culture that children will die. Children grow up and become adults and perhaps marry and have children of their own, and they come home for Christmas, and they call us on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. We get together and watch their children and reminisce how it was when they were small and we were younger. We pass on to them not only our genes—our blue eyes and the shape of our fee—but our ancestral pictures, our family recipes, our holiday customs, and when we are old and frail they will come to see us and love us. And we will leave them. They won’t leave us.

And then it is over. It is not going to happen. We are in a shambles, wounded by the event of their death.

With an ache that is physical and encompassing, we miss their presence now. And that space which in our fantasy they were to have filled until the end of our life is empty, and will be, until the end of our life. There will be others we love—other children, other smiles and tilts of head, other voices, but not theirs.

And we wonder, how could so small a complex of blood and tissue, nerve and bone and love contain so much of our heart’s lode?

~Matha Whitmore Hickman

***

It is an affront. It is a reversal of nature. It is terror. It is panic. It will break our heart. And for a while we think maybe that will happen. We, too, will die and be spared. We will flee away. And it will be over.

But life does not treat us like that. Nor, except in our worst moments, is that what we want.

We do want life… But how?

~Matha Whitmore Hickman

***

With what a deep devotedness of woe

I wept thy absence - o'er and o'er again

Thinking of thee, still thee, till thought grew pain,

And memory, like a drop that, night and day,

Falls cold and ceaseless, wore my heart away!

~Thomas Moore

And yet...

Good-night! good-night! as we so oft have said

Beneath this roof at midnight, in the days

That are no more, and shall no more return.

Thou hast but taken up thy lamp and gone to bed;

I stay a little longer, as one stays

To cover up the embers that still burn.

~Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

***

He who has gone, so we but cherish his memory, abides with us, more potent, nay, more present than the living man.

~Antoine de Saint-Exupery

***

Life is eternal, and love is immortal,

and death is only a horizon;

and

a horizon is nothing save the limit of our sight.

~Rossiter Worthington Raymond

***

Love is missing someone whenever you're apart, but somehow feeling warm inside because you're close in heart.

~Kay Knudsen

Picture: http://twitpic.com/15xdu1

~Matha Whitmore Hickmanm, I Will Not Leave You Desolate

Thursday's Therapy - Writing Sometimes Helps

Thursday's Therapy

Writing Sometimes Helps

from

A TCF Speech – 8 Things I’ve Learned About the Grief of a Grieving Parent

Part Four of Eight

Sunday, July 6, 2003 - TCF National Conference Closing Speech by Charlie Walton

Part Four

4. WRITING SOMETIMES HELPS

Number four... writing sometimes helps. I have been amazed through the years that people who, way back in elementary school, were traumatized by some English teacher with a merciless red grading pencil, traumatized into thinking that they could never write anything, will suddenly produce beautiful poems and other written sentiments in the process of remembering their children.

There is something therapeutic about putting things on paper, reading them over, changing a word here, adjusting an emphasis there, that really helps to focus the mind and get some of those inner feelings out where we can deal with them more effectively.

It works by the same principle as making a list when you've got more to do than you can hold in your mind. You know, when you think you have a hundred things to do, and then you put that list down on paper, and suddenly realized that you really only had seven things to do. It's just that they were swirling around in your head so fast that seven things looked like a hundred things.

So, consider writing down your feelings if you haven't already.

Don't worry about phrasing things for others to read. You don't need to start out shooting for publication. Just put some words on paper that work for you, words that feel good when you read them over to yourself. Later, if your words help others when they are shared, that's good too. But, for starters, just dump some of what's in your mind onto paper. Read it over, work it over, bathe it in tears until it feels good.

Writing doesn't necessarily work for everybody, but maybe pulling things out of your weary mind and onto a defenseless piece of paper can work for you.

************

More quotes regarding the helpfulness of writing amidst your grief:

"The mind-shift between pain and possibility depends on your willingness to feel, to become vulnerable."

Rico believes this is done

"by focusing on whatever you are feeling here and now, this very moment, and giving it your words on a page."

Telling a story about these feelings takes the process one step further and allows even more healing to take place.

~Gabriele Rico, Pain and Possibility

One must tell it slowly and carefully; how his son fell ill, how he suffered, what he said before he died, how he died. One must describe every detail of the funeral, and the journey to the hospital to fetch the defunct’s clothes. His daughter Anissia remained in the village—one must talk about her too. Was it nothing he had to tell? Surely the listener would gasp and sigh, and sympathize with him?

~Anton Chekhov

******

And from www.oneyearofwritingandhealing.com comes the following inspirational saga of how one mother grappled with her deep grief:

One particular article that caught my attention is one entitled “Healing Power of the Pen” …a moving article by a woman, Alice J. Wisler, written four years after the death of her four-year-old son, Daniel.

The first year after the death of a child is like having the worst noise possible running through your head each day and night. There is no way to turn the horrendous sounds off because there is no off button. I wrote through that noise. . .

She writes of carrying her journal to a particular spot beneath weeping willows at a local park and writing there. She did this, she says, over the course of many months, and she observes, with the benefit of hindsight, how her writing moved along a progression

similar to that of many of the psalms:

“starting with anger and agony and, gradually, ending with hope.”

She writes of how writing can begin the process of transforming devastation:

We enter into our devastation, get a good grip on what our struggles are and something about seeing them on paper causes us to realize the pain is not only within us anymore. It is shared, even if only on a sheet of notebook paper.

It is documented and the more we write, the better we are able to understand and deal with our intense sorrow.

Ms. Wisler offers such a deeply felt and hard-earned template of what is possible:

Moving from the inarticulate—the worst noise possible—those horrendous sounds inside her head with no off button—to the articulate. Moving from noise to words.

Moving, over the course of many months—and perhaps years—from a place of devastation to a place where she is able to understand and deal with intense sorrow.

Perhaps what grief requires, as much as anything, is that the process not be interrupted. That it find a time and a place in which to unfold--with a companion (when possible) and without (too much) interruption.

And, perhaps, at least for some of us, writing can play a role in this process.

******

Thank you to D. Morrow of http:// bit.ly/6VCdeb of www.oneyearofwritingandhealing.com