Skip to main content

Bittersweet


The cold wind cuts bitterly across my soul.  The rumbling grey sky reflects my thoughts.  Knees pressed down in the sparse dead grass.  My fingers in the dirt.  I press them in as if I could dig her up and everything would be as it should.  I cry like a baby and trace my fingers across her name.  Oh, God, help me!

What can I do?  I ask it  as I straighten the tiny Christmas tree beside the cold hard stone.  Such a contrast…  the shiny colorful balls dancing with light right up there next to that grey, sour rock that screams of death.  What can I do when my life is like this strange juxtaposition of joy and pain?  Oh, I don’t feel it so deeply every day anymore, or I don’t think I could bear it.  But those special days.   You know, the special moments that holidays are full of…  watching the wonder in your tiny ones eyes when the lights and music of flashy floats pass by in the Christmas parade.  The sweetness highlights her absence.  And so the pain is heightened.  Bittersweet.  Moments of jagged knives ripping into my soul as I stand there smiling in the crowd.  Trying desperately to be full of holiday cheer.  Wanting not to miss a second with the three precious ones here now.

What can I do?  Worship music floats from the car where my babies wait for me.  Please make this pain count!  I pray to the God who sees.    I unclench my hands and let the grass slip from my fingers.  Please make my life count!  Pushing up, I get back on my feet.  At least on the outside I do. 

What can I do?  The only thing that comes to me.  It’s just this little word.  Write.  So I am.  I kissed my toddlers in their beds and with baby in my arms, I am pecking away with the one hand that is left. 

That’s all I have to offer.  What is left.  And so do you.  We live in an imperfect world where suffering creeps in slowly or seizes us suddenly, but none of us are immune.  And yet the place hidden down deep inside that screams “Please make this count for something!  Make my life count for something!” is the very proof that eternity exists.  Our longing for it, for something better, something more meaningful, more perfect is evidence that it is real.  And that we were created to be part of a larger story and that you and I have a part to play that no one else can play (if I may borrow words from John Elkins, author of Waking the Dead and other fabulous books).

So this Christmas I will offer the gift of myself to Him again in hopes that he truly can make something good of this mess I have become.  What else can I do when he came to be born just so he could die for that very reason?  To ransom me.  To take this mess of me and make much of my nothing.  Bittersweet.  A bitter cup for him to swallow, but oh how sweet that love would drink it for me!


For God so loved the world, that he gave his one and only son, that whoever believes in him will not perish but have everlasting life.  John 3:16

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Deafening Silence

In a single second my life has been radically altered.  My precious gift from God, sweet Makiah Kaitlyn, has gone to be with Jesus long before her time.  I know in my heart that she is happy, but my arms are so empty... my house so dreadfully quiet.  I feel at times that a horrible blackness has enveloped me.  I feel as though my insides are screaming.  I am clawing and fighting to break out of this torturous body- to escape from this oppressive reality, but I cannot escape.  The dark anguish leaps on me again and again.  It sits on my chest and presses against my very life breath.  My heart feels utterly crushed and broken- pummeled into a thousand pieces.  Life as I knew it has been shattered and the shards that are left are painful and sharp.  Cutting me as I try to walk through them.  This is the valley of the shadow of death.  How dark is that shadow! Her room is perfectly untouched.  All of the dolls in her dollhou...
Post a Comment
Read more

Toes

Outside the sky is grey and dreary.  I feel it should rain torrents today.  I think the whole earth should cry out in grief.  I feel my heart pounding in my head.  My eyes will barely open, and I think no more tears can possibly come.  Maybe I will stand in the rain and borrow the tears from the sky. I look down at sparkly pink toes, and they are lonely.  Makiah, our last Sunday together you spent the morning in bed with Mommy (because I am on bed rest).  We ate fruit loops and snuggled.  We practiced drawing your letters and painted our fingers and toes.  You wanted rainbow toes, but I didn't have the colors with me.  I promised I'd paint you rainbow toes later.  Once we were all pink you said, "I got an idea!  Let's put sparklies over the pink, and you have to do it, too, Mommy, so we can be twins!"  You are such a princess!  So pink toes became sparkly toes.  We giggled and hugged and admired our matching fe...
1 comment
Read more

Wells of Living Water

My eyes filled with tears when my mother-n-law told me of her friend's idea.  This sweet lady, whom I've never met, wanted to know if she could do something special in honor of Makiah.  She said God had put it on her heart to start a well project for her.  She would sell "living water well charms" through Operation Blessing International to raise money to build a well for underprivelaged children in a poverty stricken country.  She said when 600 charms have been purchased, a well with a permanent plaque would be built to commemorate Makiah's life.  Not only was this an amazing idea, it was linked to my daughter's heart in a way that shocked me... What this thoughtful lady could not have known was that only 2 weeks before the accident, Makiah came into the kitchen on a Sunday morning carrying her whole piggy bank.  She told me she wanted to take it all to "give to the kids who need clean water."  The preschool class at church had been raising mon...
Post a Comment
Read more