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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

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