An overflowing cup . . . a full heart.

Four years ago today, we were planning a celebration.  It was a home going celebration, a celebration of a life well lived. Four days earlier we were planning a different kind of party, a birthday party. A celebration of 30 years on this earth.

What a difference one moment in time can make. In the blink of an eye, in one breath not taken, the world as we know it shifts.

These last four years have been indescribably difficult yet they have been filled with such and out pouring of love from family and friends. I have heard people say over and over that just a few months after a death people disappear and grow weary of the grief. That they are told to buck up and get over it. (As if there is a chance of “getting over it”)

Today on Jason’s birthday I want to thank my family and friends for not being the norm. Not one time have I felt like you just wanted me to get back to “normal”, “to get over it”, to “move on”. I can’t tell you how much that means to me.

I love that you have let me experience my grief how I needed to experience it. I love that you have never left my side. How you have accepted this new me, because the old me will never be again.

Thank you for speaking of Jason, for reminding me of fun times you had with him. Thank you for telling me how much he meant to you, for telling me stories about him that I had never heard. Thank you for telling me you miss him too. This means more to me than you will ever know.

Thank you for being Jesus’s arms that have hugged me, his shoulder to lean on. Thank you for showering God’s love on me.

There are so many I could name here, but I won’t try and name names, there are too many. Two exceptions my daughter, Chelsey, and husband., Tim They have been my rocks, my heart.

My heart is full, my cup is overflowing.

¹³ Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. ¹⁴ For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him. ¹⁵ According to the Lord’s word, we tell you that we who are still alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will certainly not precede those who have fallen asleep.¹⁶ For the Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. ¹⁷ After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever. ¹⁸ Therefore encourage one another with these words. I Thess 4

Time. Grief. God’s Goodness.

Today I am sitting in Jason’s garden.  I have not done that much this year, it has made me too sad. This has been a difficult season for me, I am still trying to put my finger on why. Maybe I need to stop trying to figure out why and just let it be. The sadness is deeper this year, harder to shake off. Maybe there is no why maybe it just is.

Psalms 147:3 He heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds

Psalms 73:26 My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever.

Tomorrow is the 4 year anniversary of the day my world changed forever.

Time is a funny thing, it can seem like forever while feeling like it just happened yesterday.

Grief is a strange companion, mostly polite and staying in a distance so as not to bother life’s everyday. But some days it is demanding and will not be pushed away. (Read more about my thoughts on grief here)

But this truth I hang on to, God is good all the time.

I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the LORD in the land of the living.   Psa 27:11

 

I remain grateful and feeling blessed for the privilege of mothering this boy turned man. I thank God for the time we were given the last month of his life.  I praise God knowing I will see him again.

And then I smile at the mental picture of Jason, praising God for eternity.

What I have learned about grief

Grief is sneaky. Out of the blue grief sneaks up on me. I do my best to prepare for the anniversaries, the times I know it will be hard. But it pops up, unwanted and unexpected.

Grief is strong. When grief hits it can take me down to the ground. Swiftly, I am out of breath and drowning.

Grief does not play fair. I make deals with grief, it can come when I am prepared, when I am ready to take it on, we have an agreement. Grief does not always abide by that agreement.

Grief is a thief. It sneaks in, uninvited, like a bull in a china shop, breaking our agreement and tries to steal my joy.

This is what I have learned about my grief. I say “my grief”, because everyone has a different grief visiting them, not all griefs are the same.

I have learned to give grief a time limit, especially when it shows up unannounced and bullies me into a puddle of tears. I give my grief  time and attention but with limits. I give myself permission to cry, a lot if I need to. I give myself permission to be sad, very, very sad, if I need to.

And then I invite grief to leave.

These are some ways I encourage my grief to leave; I go outside and soak up some nature. I listen to praise music, I read the psalms. I take a walk/run to get some good brain chemicals active. I count my blessings. I do something creative. I feed my soul. I pray.

I don’t always feel like I want to do these things, but I do them. I am persistent, I keep at it until grief finally gives in. Until it packs up it’s baggage and leaves.

So today, I am being persistent, grief swooped in yesterday and knocked me to my knees, but today I am standing. I am inviting grief to leave without taking my joy with it. Having cried myself to sleep last night in the wonderful arms of my understanding husband, I am sitting in my garden this morning. Worship is music playing, I watch the birds drink from the sprinkler, and the momma and poppa swallows try to keep up with the feeding of the littles. I am preparing for a prayerful walk/run with psalms of praise running through my mind.

I will not let grief overtake me. I have so much to be grateful for, I love my life, I will not let grief rob me of my joy.

 

The Lord is my shepherd, I lack nothing. He makes me lie down in green pastures he leads me beside quiet waters, he refreshes my soul. He guides me along the right paths for his name’s sake.  Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever. Ps 23

And so it begins . . .

. . . the season of Jason. That is what I call this part of summer. From now until the end of August is a tough time for me. Four years later I have moved beyond the paralyzing grief to a quiet sadness that comes and goes during these days. I miss him, I think of him everyday. But I smile more at the memory of him. I am thankful for the man he grew to be. I am grateful for every day I had the pleasure of being his mom.

This summer I feel ready to let go a little more, we will be spreading Jason’s ashes on August 21st at Canyonville Camp.

This I still hold true, God is good all the time, and all the time God is good.

Here is a post I wrote about a month after Jason went home:

My journey this summer begins July 9th.

My son, Jason, called me, he had been struggling with “asthma” for a few weeks. He was struggling to breathe, could hardly walk across the room. A trip to the emergency room was needed, but he had been laid off a couple months previous. No insurance kept coming up, but finally he went. Little did we know at the time what would come of this.

A few hours later he was intubated and in an induced coma. I found myself sitting in a consultation room in ICU, trying understand the doctors words. He kept saying fragile. The doctor talked about a long recovery. It took days for me to understand that my son, was on the brink of death that day. Twice that night they brought him back.

For the next 17 days, we hovered, spoke softly to Jason. Spoke our love to him. He could not respond, but we wanted him to know. We sat vigil by his bedside. On the 18th day he regained consciousness, he was able to “thumbs up”. He often used the sign language sign for I love you. We communicated in a way, as he still had the tube down his throat, keeping him alive. But it was so good to communicate. The tube came out a few days later, he talked and talked. Of plans for his future, how he longed to serve God. how he wanted out of the hospital to begin his new life that was given back to him.

Quickly he got better, faster than anyone anticipated. But there continued to be that word – fragile. If you knew my Jason, fragile would not have ever been a word to describe him. Nine strapping pounds at birth, and every football coach that ever laid eyes on him, wanted him. Fragile was not what I would have ever used. but there it was, time and time again. Jason was far from out of the woods. He had a heart problem that caused his lungs to fill with liquid. It was treatable, but it would be a long haul.

His lungs recovered enough that finally on July 29th he got to go home. He was learning to live with this new discovery about his health. He researched it, he was going to beat it.

Then, suddenly, on August 3rd, 2011 – he went home. His real, permanent home. He was found like he just went to sleep and woke up in heaven.

So my son, with a heart so big with love, died of heart failure.

I miss him. I will see him again.

Jesus and Picket Signs

This morning I am sitting in my garden wondering about the righteous indignation I have been seeing. The picket signs, the yelling, the hate and judgment spilling from the mouths of “the righteous”.

I don’t recall Jesus ever carrying a picket sign. I began to think about the only times that I see Jesus outraged and angry was with hypocrites.

I see Jesus sitting with and loving people, I see him telling stories and inviting them to him. I see him moving through the masses with kindness while speaking truth with love. I see him feeding the hungry, healing the sick, I see him loving the sinner, which by the way is all of us. He calls us to himself gently and with unending love.

The picketing, the condemning to hell, not only turns my stomach it makes me extremity sad. It also makes me wonder, how pompous it must seem to Jesus. No one here on earth has the power to grant access to heaven or condemn to hell. How presumptuous to stand before another of God’s creations and pass such a judgment. Who do we think we are?

When they kept on questioning him, he straightened up and said to them,
“Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” John 8:7

Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye but
fail to notice the beam in your own eye? … Matt 7:3 (Luke 6:42)

I for one have much in my own life that needs attention before I begin to judge another.

On the other side, while I may or may not support certain things I reserve the right to do so with out being called out. Religious freedom, civil freedom, like or not gives us all the right to have an opinion with out being labeled. We seem to forget that freedom of speech and thought applies to all, not to just who we agree with. To threaten to take away another’s right to live out their convictions is wrong and hypocritical no matter which side of the line you stand on.

This is a very rough collection of thoughts and I want to end here with this:

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have
loved you, so you must love one another. … John 13:34

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
 1 Cor 13:13

Calling all men . . .

As a follow up to yesterday’s blog, I want to thank the men who recognized the need in my children for a male presence. There were many, my dad, my brothers, and wonderful men from my church family. Youth pastors played huge roles in my children’s lives.

To the men who complimented my daughter, who gently teased her, who showed her how a man should treat a woman, how a dad should love his children and how a husband cared for his family, I am eternally grateful to you.

To the men who took my son on father/son fishing trips, to the men who mentored my son, who pointed him to Jesus, who showed him how to be a man, how to shave, how to treat a lady, who showed him how to protect and care for the women in his life, I can not express my gratitude.

Men, I want to challenge you to look for the fatherless around you, take a few minutes to think about how you can fill the gap, how you can serve that single mom that has no idea how to teach her young son how to grow up to be a man. She probably won’t ask, a single mom is used to doing it on her own, she may not know how to ask or where to look for help. If she is like me she won’t even know, when asked, how to articulate what she needs.

This is what she needs: she needs whole families to take her children on outings, she needs for her children to see how whole families interact with each other. She needs her children to see you treat your wife with respect, she needs her children to see you hold your wife’s hand, and hug your children. She needs you to show her son how to shave, how to change the oil on the car, how to set up a tent, how to fish, and how to play ball. She needs you to take her daughter with your daughters on an ice cream date, she needs you to show her daughter how a man should treat a woman, how a daddy treats his daughters.

God blessed me with amazing friends and family that recognized what I could not express, my children would not have grown into amazing adults with out my God, friends and family. Thank-you is too small a word to express my gratitude, but it is the only word I have.

Thank-you.

 

The day before THE Day – Revisited

Good Morning – On this day before “The Day” I want to revisit my blog from last year. On this day especially since the death of my son, I think of how Jesus’ closest friends and family must felt, how sad and hopeless. And then there was Sunday!

We celebrate Good Friday, we worship in eternal gratefulness Resurrection Sunday, but there is a day in between. This morning I was thinking of this day in between. What was that day like?

We often give Jesus’ followers a bad rap, we talk about how they did not believe, how they hid away. This day in between must have been so confusing. Their King, friend, teacher, Shepard had died before their very eyes. I’m sure they all had stories in their heads about how Jesus’ capture and crucifixion would go. Think about it, if you walked with him every day and saw the incredible miracles how would you imagine the end? I think I would imagine Jesus’ saving himself, or God’s army of angels giving those soldiers what they rightfully deserved. I know I would have been in that room with all the others trying to make sense of what I just saw. How can you make sense of that with our earthly bound, finite minds. We often can’t make sense of the death of a loved one who was not God, how could you make sense of God in human form dying?

I don’t blame them for hiding out, for being confused. At the very least taking time to re-group. Grief is a strong powerful thing to our human minds, sometimes it takes hiding out, returning to the familiar to get our bearings.

On this day in between I wonder, what was happening? Was Martha making sure everyone was fed? Was Mary sitting in a corner of the room weeping? What were the disciples thinking? Were the discussions amid their grief centered around what’s next? Were they feeling left behind, a little betrayed? Were they wondering if the last few years were real? This just did not happen like they thought it might.

If we are honest would not we have reacted in the same manner? I know I would have gone to the familiar to re-group, maybe even hide. I know I would have been wondering if I had just given the last few years of my life to a dream that just blew up. I think about the things of so much less magnitude that shake our faith, make us doubt, Jesus’ followers were human with feelings like ours. Let’s give them a little grace this season, understand how confused and grief stricken they were.

Take a minute, try to imagine what this day in between held, what you would be feeling and doing. Then celebrate with all of creation for the next day, the day that brought unbelievable, uncontainable joy to all.

Have a blessed Resurrection Day!

Broken

 

I entered this new year with great dreams of running a few 5ks this summer. My foot repaired and healing well, my husband willing to give running a good try. Big dreams. Big goals.

I sit here this morning a little broken, physically for sure, and fighting the mental brokenness that often comes with physical. Looking for the lessons that are sure to be lurking in the corners of broken.

I am drawn to broken seashells, there is beauty inside the shells that can not bee seen until they are broken enough to reveal what is inside.

Colors and patterns hidden inside. Beauty missed if left intact. I want to be like that in this season. I want light to shine into my corners and reveal gratitude instead of bitterness. Broken with grace is hard work, it is easy for me to fall into the habit complaining.

If I am honest, I am a little jealous when I see people jogging. I am missing walking on the sand by the sea. I am not fond of crutches, (I tamed that down a lot 🙂 ). I am an active person that finds it extremely hard to sit still for too long. This season of stillness has been difficult but there are lessons to be learned. I want to learn them, I want to use my broken to find beauty hidden in my corners.

The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart, O God, you will not despise.
Psalm 51:17

 

How does God put up with me?

 

We live in a world where complaining is just part of our conversation. We whine “this line is too long”, “it took so long for that waitress to bring my food”, “why is this taking so long?”, “I don’t have . . . ” It goes on and on. It has become just how we communicate, we whine, we complain.

I have had a week of listening to just that, there is a lot of change happening where I work, good exciting things, but the path to get there is a little painful. And then there is me complaining about their complaining. Whew, no wonder I am so tired when I get home.

All the while we lose site of the fact that we have a job, a good job. We lose fact that we should count it a privilege to sit in a nice clean waiting room to see a doctor. It should be counted a privilege to wait to have food served to us. We should count it all a privilege.

There is so much we should be grateful for, I have a saying that is a little joking but so full of truth, when I am met with a lot of complaining. “At least you aren’t sleeping under a bridge tonight” This statement is as much for me as anyone. What an abundance we live with.

There are people in hospice that are grateful for just that next breath, there are people living under bridges that are grateful for the sandwich a stranger gave them, there are people who are grateful to have any job even if it is working a field.

How can I be so brazen before God to complain about anything. Anything at all. All that I have is a gift, straight from the hand of God. How is that not enough? How would I feel if I handed precious gems to my children and they complained because it was not gold, or it was not enough. How does God put up with us?

Eve did it, “why can’t I eat that?”. Adam did it “why did you give me this woman to tempt me?”  The Israelites did it “why do we have to eat that?” From the beginning of time God, who has showered us with blessings has had to listen to our ungratefulness.

While thinking about this I wondered why God created us this way? If it were me I sure would have taken that module out, I would have snipped that wire that went to the complaining component. Then I realize complaining isn’t the problem it is a symptom. The problem is that we were created with a longing for something more. We were created with an empty space, We look around for something to fill it. Things, action, anything but what was meant to fill it. How ridiculous we must sound to God.

There is a very real reason we feel unsatisfied. It is a God sized hole. Only God can fill it.  God created that in all of us, I need to remember to fill my complaining corner with God.

I have been sitting here thinking of all the things I tend to complain about, I am ashamed.

Instead of complaining about being stuck in traffic I want to thank God for the ability to travel so easily. Instead of complaining about waiting on the doctor again, I want to thank God I have medical care. Instead of complaining about waiting for my food, I want to be grateful that we can sit in a nice warm space and have food served to me. Instead of complaining about cleaning the bathroom, I want to be thankful that I have a nice warm home to clean.

Do you find yourself in the habit of complaining? How will you show your gratitude today?

Overflowing

There are some days that I just wake up grateful, so grateful. Not that I am not always grateful, but some days it just feels like it will just completely overflow my heart.

Today is one of those days, I am so in love with my husband that I can hardly contain it. We are coming up on 7 years since our first date. Seven years, so hard to imagine that is was that long ago but it also feels like a life time, in a good way.

I love where I live, I love where I work, I love my family – my heart is full to overflowing.