Hope

Today Will needed to be alone and I needed to be not here so I spent the day, well, not here. Here is one of the hardest places in the world to be. Here sucks.

I spend much of the day sitting on a dock with one of my dearest friends. She’s one of those rare people who doesn’t fill the silence just for the sake of filling it. She’s a gift. We talked, we didn’t talk, then we talked. She let me ramble and try to make sense of the insanity swirling in my head.

The entire world has shifted. It’s as if every particle of everything has completely come apart, then come back together in entirely new patterns. Nothing looks the same, sounds the same or feels the same. I thought maybe over the last days I had turned some sort of corner. Maybe I have. Does grief have corners? Tonight as I searched Hobby Lobby for something to make, something to do, some way to express my grief I realized that while much of that feeling that I’m walking around without any skin on, injured by even the slightest gust of wind, has dwindled the pain has seeped deeper. It’s taking root in who I am. It’s changing who I am.

This probably sounds like sci-fi or some sort of psychosis but I think it’s exactly what has to happen. The death of my beautiful, hilarious, exhausting, amazing 19 month old son should change me but I get to choose how.

And there it is again, choice.

In the moments and hours after Damon’s death I had to make a choice with every breath. Inhale, believe God, exhale, believe God, inhale believe God… It was a choice. I had to choose to bring my agony, my fury, my endless questions, my empty arms to Him. It is a choice.

I keep thinking over and over and over, there are mothers who will lose their babies and they will walk into the black, thinking they are alone… I open my eyes every morning, talk myself out of bed and keep fighting because I know in whom I have believed. I know my Jesus. I know His heart. I trust His heart even when I don’t understand the work of His hands. His truth sustains me. Nothing else could.

The word “conversion” has always bugged me. Why do we say we want to convert people? Is this Biblical? I don’t know but I know I have no desire to convert anyone. Are we vans?

What I want, the only thing that seems to matter at all anymore is for everyone to get it. Really get it. Faith is not about rules, it is not about buildings, and it is not about religion. It is about relationship. Gospel means “good news!” Jesus is GOOD news. Go into all the world and preach the good news is not a mandate to convert it is an opportunity to be couriers of letters of love. Without this love, without Yahweh this world is simply unbearable, unsurvivable and hopeless. I have hope.