I always imagined the weeks before training camp would be happy and exciting.
But now we’re here, and these have been two of the hardest weeks of my life.
First, I lost a member of my F squad family. That was hard.
But I’d live through that day ten more times if it would erase what happened five days later.
My cross country team is one of the closest families I’ve ever been part of.
When one of my teammates takes his life, I don’t know what to do with that. You can read a lot more details about that and how I’ve dealt with it here.
Somehow it’s only been four and a half days. The first two days were the slowest, but even now it still feels like it should have been at least a week.
“Clocks ticked, but time did not pass. The sun rose and the sun set, but the shadows remained. When once there was sound, now there was silence. What once was whole, now was shattered. “
It’s been a bit of a struggle to get excited. About anything, much less leaving the country(and my team, who this week have felt more like my family than ever before).
If you know me at all, you know I get excited about ev-er-y-thing. I’m Olaf from Frozen.
So you can imagine how odd it is for me to feel dead inside while reading my other squad mates’ blog posts about counting down to training camp.
It took a while for me to be able to pray. I was too mad at God to talk to him, and definitely too mad to listen.
Finally on Wednesday night as I was driving home, I told him, “Okay, I’m just done being sad. And I’m too sad to think of anything to say to you. So can you just get the sad to be over? Maybe help me stop crying? Then you can tell me how to go on.”
But all he said was, “It’s okay to be sad.”
Ironically that just made me cry more. But in a better way than I’d been all week.
Lots of times in the past I’ve heard people say, “Jesus wept, so can you.” I wonder if they ever stop to think about what they were saying. I didn’t until today.
Remember why Jesus was weeping? His friend was dead. Read John 11.
He even knew what was fixing to happen next. He knew full well that in just a little bit, his friend would be alive again.
So why did he cry?
Because sad things happen so that God’s good plan can happen, but that doesn’t mean the sad things aren’t still sad.
It’s sad that Daniel is gone, even though it’s great that God can use this for something good.
So it’s okay to cry for the one while praising God for the other.
Once I figured that out, I slowly started to feel better.
I’m still not all the way there. That’ll take a long time.
But I’m excited again. Packing was fun, rather than stressful. Funny I say “was” as if I’m done…I’m about halfway there.
I’ll finish in the morning. If I can sleep tonight, that is…I’m way too excited.
It feels good to be that again. 🙂
