Dedicated to those mourning, especially to my wonderful mom, grandma and cousins still walking through the stages.
I have been trying to write this blog for a while. I think I was trying to write it even before Swaziland. Something to make it easier. Easier to say goodbye, to mourn, to risk daringly and love deeply. Something beautiful and spun together, to bring hope and life in the midst of grief.
Grief is something we experience a lot on the race. We go from country to country experiencing heartache for those in seemingly impossible situations. We love them, get to know them to pick up and leave again. We fall in love with countries and the people we have had the opportunity to know. We leave home, our family and friends behind to love the unknown.
Choosing to love another means heartache to leave the other. Choosing in and to reach out is possibly one of the hardest parts of the race. From past mistakes, simple human nature, through life lessons we learn to hold back, we learn that humans have faults which means they can hurt us. Being hurt is a way to let fear into your life. I mean it makes sense. People and relationships happen, sometimes it is messy, but does not our God make beautiful things out of our messes? are we ourselves not a beautiful mess? The chaos of our world is more than I can even comprehend but what I do know is this:
Isaiah 45:18-19a NLT
For the Lord is God,
and he created the heavens and earth
and put everything in place.
He made the world to be lived in,
not a place of empty chaos..
“I am the Lord” he says,
“and there is no other.
I publicly proclaim bold promises…”
Bold promises of comfort in sorrow (psalm46:1) promises of grace and unconditional love through Jesus death on the cross.
It doesn’t matter when in your life it happens, what age or how often you have dealt with it, grief is hard. It happens when you and a very good friend grow apart, or when you move from one season to the next in your life, and when you loose someone; grief is HARD.
You can Google all the stages, you are told to stay strong, you can try and put it in a box. But the truth is this pain, that this grief you feel cannot be put in a box. The real truth is none of the stages actually have to go in order. You can go back and forth or jump around, but you most surely will go through all of them. No formula can tell you how long it will take or what is coming next.
Grief is something I am no stranger to as I am sure you aren’t either. I’ve gone through different stages and seasons. Things like going off to college, making friends, friendships breaking off unexpectedly, guilt or death. All of this is part of life.
We have good days and bad days, we have days that are just ok. We get curve balls out of nowhere that spin us out of comfortability and they challenge us and grow us. Grow us to make decisions on where to turn, who will we will cling to or find our hope in even when it all falls apart.
Month 7 I was thrown a curve ball that I never expected to experience on the race. One phone call threw me and spun me out, one 5 min call where my mom told me in a broken voice that she was gone. Her sister, my aunt died when her car spun out.
The news hit me like a freight train that I didn’t hear coming and threw me quickly from complacently and tiredness into shock and unbelief. I could barely get the words to form in my head.
The shock quickly turned to loud giant sobs that I am sure echoed off the walls of the home that I shared with 15 other women. In the middle of nowhere Swaziland where the minutes on the phone ran out fast and feeling utterly helpless. There was nowhere I could go, I couldn’t just jump in a car and be there. I couldn’t magically be around family. I have experienced a lot of death, but I have almost always been blessed to be around family. To be able to go back, to mourn with them. Naturally questions flooded my mind things like “Lord, how is this fair, why? What. This is the last thing I expected.”
I remember my mobilizer calling back a few minutes later to check in and see how I was doing. Her praying for me. Praying that I could sit in that pain for whatever length of time I needed. That struck me hard. Sit in pain? what does that mean? Lord huh? I am not sure I know what that looks like.
Even in the mess of me trying learn what it is to mourn with God and no family around, what it is to take time and not always be going. To actually process, to grieve, God showed up when I was that mess. What I call messy and dirty he calls a beautiful mess and he sweeps in to help pick up the pieces. He showed up in the form of my teammate who had gotten a sim card for her iPhone and bought data so she could have internet and call home with the magic jack app. Who then graciously allowed me to use it when I needed it to call home so I could have longer more precious conversations with family that I needed.
He provided exactly 1 month later the opportunity of my mom to come out and join me on the field where we had time to talk about it more, and allowed my mom time to step away from the chaos back home and experience something completely different and new. Finally he allowed me to receive letters from home. Letters that were full of encouragement, life updates and love from those whom I miss so much.
Many which were full of so much wisdom, but one in particular that speaks directly to this blog.
“Life in ministry is never the easy life. But always a rich life. You are invited into the holy on a regular basis, and sometimes a situation becomes Holy just because you are there-and because Jesus comes with you. So on the tough days remember that. (We) are Christ-bearers, chosen to carry the light of life into a very dark world. To show up in the dirty places, because those are the kind of places Jesus likes to hang out. To remind people they haven’t been forgotten or misplaced. That Jesus knows right where they are, because he sent (us) to them.”
????????? -a wise women
Whether you do a week, month or years of mission the fact is that in Gods timing it is all short term. We only get so long on this earth. No matter where you go or for how long you do eventually have to leave. Eventually you leave that place to go on to normal every day, to move on to another calling, or simply leave the earth. God is at work through all of it, truthfully he has laid that desire for something more, for something greater than societies beliefs.
I now know that I have another angel up there looking out for me. Another one who stands beside me and my squad mates carrying an extra light so that we shine even brighter as we enter the last few months of a path God has brought us too.
