Grace & Hope

1095.

Gillian_Carnegie,_Black_Square If memory serves me well, we were all just floating; hollowed hearts recoiled by death’s touch.  You don’t just get over such things.

Year’s from the touch, our hearts still feel tender in moments of our memory’s choosing.  It’s easy to feel captive about what you will and won’t allow yourself to esteem or talk about.  We’ve held a high rule in our home since Marianne’s death, a rule that has held us together tightly in times grief would’ve pulled us apart.  It is always okay to talk about memories of her.  In fact, more than okay, sharing memories is a measured must that keeps gauge of our honest movement through grief and life inexplicably coming undone.

Tomorrow makes three years. What makes grief so precariously hard to track is its random rhythm in our lives.  Out of nowhere a difficult string of days will move in unpredictably - tempers flair, patience flattens thin, arguments stir quick and tears do fall freely.  We are a war torn bunch who sometimes jump at the sound of grief’s return.  Never was it easy, and our memories don’t let us forget that.

Still my daughters hold tightly to those close to them.  Goodbyes are hard.  Each time we leave family after a visit or they leave our house after a few days all together, I recognize their little eyes dim for a bit.  They grow quiet, and they remember the feeling of letting go.  One day, I’ll have a conversation with the women they will be.  I hope to hear sadness their vocabulary struggles to express at times in their young age.  I pray their future expression of sadness will give greater evidence to God’s faithful watch over them in His keeping of their designed destiny.  Then my joy will be touched with wholeness and once again reminded of the fury and mystery of grace.  Maybe I’ll need reminding then.

In poignant eloquence and thoughts collected, too, from the sting of pain, C.S. Lewis observed, “We regard God as an airman regards his parachute; it's there for emergencies but he hopes he'll never have to use it.”  

That learned reality is the blessed fruit of pain experienced; to know God because of healing bruises.  Only in that regard, maybe I’m more blessed than some.  Amen and amen.

Memories taking me back three years and some still hold dark insecurities that if given open door could easily overwhelm my trust in God and who He is.  Other memories of saving grace and strength not of my own - from God and family and friends - float atop steady tossing waves and still give passage through grief . . . to the point where I confidently say I am forever healing and not forever grieving.

Grief does burst in and out of life unpredictably.  I think many reasons play culprit to grief’s irrational movement in our lives, but possibly most prevalent to me is life’s fragility exposed in death’s touch.  In a moment all can be lost.  And in that same moment, all can be simultaneously found.

Friends, I count it blessing the three years behind us.  All 1,095 days.  And for as many are ahead, may grace always guide us and trust always bind us.

As Julian of Norwich hollowly spoke to times beyond her, “All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.”

Let come what may, and I pray both in smiles and tears we remain honest in all things.

As I look about and count rich blessings sprouting and blooming all around, love, marriage, family and tomorrow, I, for a moment, take to blushing at such weakness and frail faith in difficulty.  But then I am corrected by the scars of life's real blow and reminded of the even greater realness of God's hunting grace.

 

*(artist/image credit: Gillian Carnegie)

 

 

of the stitched kind :: A DEEPER FAMILY MONTHLY FEATURE

cross stitched family close up (image credit :: elsabags.blogspot.com)

It’s funny how three little girls separated by five years can have such differing opinions on the exact same happening in life.  Personality, age, temperament and individual uniqueness all certainly attribute to the differences in response.  Each of my little girls are growing into their own little person.  They see life through lenses specific to them and interpret life accordingly.

Life hasn’t been all that easy for them.

Their little eyes washed of a certain innocence have filled with tears pushed out of them by grief and loss.  When they lost their mother, they somehow simultaneously grew tightly together and stood distinctly apart.

It’s been the greatest stroke of grace to watch much of their lives end, float in insecurity and find current pushing them into a glowing new horizon.

And all in three years.

So if you’d sit with one of my daughters at some point and ask them to describe the last three years or ask them to illustrate emotions in a drawing, you’d get differing, not opposing but layered, responses.

And they’re all right.

. . . READ THE ENTIRE POST AT DEEPER FAMILY

the one thing you'd better thieve from your child's heart tonight :: A DEEPER FAMILY post

The night lingered on and all subsided back to normal.  Excitement cooled to end of night, which meant bedtime.  And then another day. Before the next day’s arrival, I laid restless tangled in bad.

:::::::

From the very moment each of my daughters entered this life, they have owned pieces of my heart.

When tears well in their eyes widened or victory swells in their hearts soaring, I am with them attentive to the emotion present.  I love seeing them succeed.  More so, their faces lighting up bright and bold send my heart into the sky.  A smile slides across their face evidencing a flash of brilliant accomplishment in their growing little hearts, and I know they feel good.

Conversely, my heart sinks with theirs when they come up short, get it wrong or make mistakes.  In my head, I know these moments may end up being the best teacher to them, but still, it’s typically harder for me to watch them realize they’re on the wrong end.  Failure on any level is tough whether you’ve failed or the situation has failed you.  As they sink into themselves and darkened emotion they fade momentarily, and I know they feel bad.

These are two states of being both leading parallel off course. 

As a parent, my top priority is to love them as complete as I can.  For me, loving them in this way means to rid their little hearts of both misguiding thoughts and lock them on course to a healthy tomorrow.

Good and bad, defined in our effort and action that lingers, staining, as tomorrow killers and God haters.

READ MORE AT DEEPER FAMILY

a note to fathers, and one for me to remember.

footsteps-in-the-sand-2 Unpack.

Unload.

Give up. Stop.

There is One who's valiantly walked a sorrowful path our feet could never belong to, who's shoulders bore burden alien to our own, who's heart swallowed life and death, fear and frailty, strength and worry and owns belonging both now and forevermore.  The role of hero forever defined in victim so there would be no more standing alone, no more holding the skies from falling, balancing plates spinning or attempt at making life better.

That role is taken, and dad, that is not yours.

Sweat of your brow, brawn of your hand, both feeble at best; wrong at worst.

The struggle to a better life is not in your own effort.  In fact, better life is not real but a fallacy we strain for measured in possession, power and position.  The more we acquire the smaller we become, dwarfed amidst maintaining all we own.  We forget value and what really matters.  Your family doesn’t need more.  They need you.  And the best of you.

Sure, we must work with diligence and effort, but God does not bless your hard work.  God blesses the humble of heart, the man whose hands lay open before Him with full awareness of limitation and broken heart.  Effort will never earn you anything in God’s eyes.  He recognizes humble hearts who confess their need for rescue, for help.

The most effective move you will ever make as a father is to stop the struggle and in holy pause, learn how to follow the path Christ pioneered for us all.

Your family needs a leader; one who leads fearlessly and follows close.

Give your family a better life, not in possession piling high and then forgotten, but in grace realized, love practiced and peace reinforced.

Start by letting go of the heavy day you know, the one that owns your time and affection.  Open your hands calloused by the ineffectual strain of earning a better life to a new way of dependence and reliance and following.

The happiest of Father’s Day to you as you rest in His immeasurable ability to give you all that you (and your family) need.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. (James 1:17, ESV)

 

(image credit: unknown)

dreams belong to the brave.

The willingness to show up changes us. It makes us a little braver each time. -Brene Brown

 

Showing up holds simple meaning.  There’s little complexity to it.  No one mistakes a person’s intent when they show up.  That person is there for a reason, on purpose.  Maybe without most of the answers, but that’s not the point.  Showing up defines us.

:: a person who wakes up :: a person who doesn’t quit :: a person unwilling to accept probably not :: a person who sees past difficulty

Bravery is little more than standing when circumstance demands you sit.  There’s little strength to it.  The bravest of people don’t feel brave, maybe foolish.  You know a brave man when you see him.  He’s probably more bent by life’s weight than others who sit.  Bravery names you.

There comes a time when you wake up enough to stars colliding, the sky lightening enough and betting the farm turns value on its head to actually making a lick of sense.  We all come to this moment at least once in life when what we dream of makes just enough sense to jump.  In that burning moment, we either do or we dam it shut, excused from sensibility and safety.

Why should it make sense?

Take a look at all things too big.  That’s just what those things were before they awed onlookers, too big – a novel, painting, building, poem, sculpture, song - some dreamer pulled down the sky and made what was seen.  After everyone knows them brave and consistent.

I’d be more willing to say that showing up and bravery are of so much more importance than the result of what you can see.  For what you can see, is the historical telling of someone unwilling to let a dream die.

Now you must ask yourself why dreams are so important that we should not let them die.

Dreams – what we wish to do in life and hope to find true – sprout from the core of who we are and can become.  I believe God gives dreams and we awake to them as we live the life given us.  We all have dreams, hopes and aspirations.  They belong to those made brave by showing up.

For me, the dream was to communicate life and faith and their often times strained interaction through story; to write books and author ideas.  The book I just finished, my first, is an exact product of the simplicity of showing up day after day.

I hope to continue the discipline and brave abandon of just showing up.  I’d invite you to join me being brave in going after our dreams.  Wake to something good forgotten, dismissed in simplicity and just begin to show up.