An Unexpected Journey

We can't totally "do Christmas" yet.  We escape to a beach in South Carolina.  A place I have never been.  To make new memories.  Try to avoid some of the old.  I pull aside heavy curtains the first morning to peek at crashing swells pummeling against white sand.  I catch my breath.  I have not seen it since she died.  I spent the last week of her life watching her chase seagulls and splashing in the blue.  Toes in the warm sand and ears held up to shiny shells.  Fortunately, little cries pull me away, and I really have no time alone to contemplate. Christmas Eve.  We give the girls presents and help them tear paper.  Capture their cuteness with a lens.  Try to freeze the memories in time.  Burn them deep into my mind.    'Oooh mouths' and tiny reaching fingers meet warm cinnamon rolls.  Slobbery kisses and snuggles in bed.  Brush aside the moments of nausea and missing.  H...

How do I describe the holidays in a life like mine?  It is hard to put into words.  Pain and joy are interwoven in a pattern unique to this season of my life.    The thread of thankfulness.  I thank God I have a reason to shop this year.   We buy the girls a few toys.   I ask Cameron if he can believe they are almost a year old.  His voice faltering, he says, “They saved our lives.”   I am caught by his answer.  Surprised at the deep truth popping so unexpectedly from his quivering lips.  A throbbing thankfulness shoots across my heart… The thread of aching.  One morning on the way to work I hurt so badly that it is physical.  A knife ripping through my chest.  Venomous thoughts tear through my mind.  A crushing desire for everyone to hurt this way so I won’t be alone in this bizarre alternate reality of holiday horror.   As if it would lessen my pain.   I hate th...

I wish I had something profound to write.   Something about the miracle of Christmas and time and hope.   But I can’t quite seem to conjour those words up to the muddy surface of my mind.   Maybe in another week it will seem clearer.   I catch a glimpse of the holiday light here and there in my swirling thoughts, but nothing I can latch on to yet.   I have had my feet washed this weekend, though, and for that I am thankful.   I mean I have been listened to and hugged and helped and my babies have been covered over with love by a very special visitor whose family sacrificed a lot to bring the water of herself to our raw and fragile lives.    And some others joined her, too. We did put up a Christmas tree, and the word HoPe   sits on my mantle all red and sparkly, drawing the eye and luring the heart.    Makiah’s green eyes laugh at us through a half dozen picture frames and old ornaments scattered about.   She would w...

We sit behind french doors overlooking the dancing ripples of the Tennessee River.  Orange and red are striking against the deep blue sky.  The leaves sway to the rhythm of glistening water.  Inside the melody drifts from the piano as my sister-n-law’s mother dances her fingers deftly across the ivory keys.  Powerful words pour from her lips and  move like a strong current through the hearts of the listening.  “His arms are fortress for the weak.  Let faith arise… I lift my hands to believe again… You are faithful God forever… Open my eyes…”  Lyrics from a song by Chris Tomlin.  I hold my daddy’s hand as tears stream down his weathered cheeks.  This year has aged us all.  I see it in my own face.  My tears join his.  We have sipped our coffee and listened to my Daddy’s deep voice read to us from Watchman Nee.  Words about eternity.  About finishing strong.  Written by one who died after many years in a Chi...

My little ones are napping and the warm chocolate morsels in my delicate pie melt slowly in my mouth.  I am trying to wrap my mind around  a thought that my mom's friend shared with her and she passed on to me.  The bible says that with the Lord a day is as a thousand years and a thousand years is as a day.  Now certain scriptures do indicate that there is some sort of passage of time in heaven, but we don't have any reason to believe that it is necessarily at the same rate there as here.  Clearly, based  scripture what feels long to us here can seem but a day to the Lord and vice versa.  Time is a dimension by which God is not defined.  Rather, he defines it .  One of his names in the bible is the Alpha and Omega, aka The Beginning and The End. Keeping all that in mind.  We don't know if time here correlates with time in heaven or not.  So my mom's friend suggested doing some math.  If one thousand years here is as a day th...

Traffic  slows almost to a halt.  I round the curve on my way to work and see two cars stopped in the road… an accident.  It doesn’t look like anyone is hurt.  But there is a mom on the side of the road clutching her little girl, maybe about 3 years old, and crying on the cell phone.  The girl looks okay.  Then a mile or so past the accident the state trooper screeches by me.  Then the ambulances.   Sirens wailing.  And I join them.   Wailing. It is just too much.  I saw the broken glass in the road.  The mommy.  The sounds.  The cell phone.  The little girl who is okay.  But now I am in that day, and the little girl is not okay.  And the mommy didn’t get to hold her… ever again.  And the ambulances didn’t come just to screen us.  They came to carry her away.   Forever.  I cannot hold it in any longer.  I am losing it.  Control.  It broke down on t...

I opened the red, leather bag to pack for the two nights away.  We were going to a conference at a church in the next state that we have attended twice a year since Makiah was born- well, until the accident.   I like to go because I can be anonymous and disappear into the crowd of worshipers.  This is a big step for me.  An act of reaching up to heaven… to God.  It was also another hurdle because of some very special nursery workers who kept her each time since she was a baby and always looked for her to come.  I knew they didn’t know. As I swept my hand across the bottom of the bag, my eye caught a glimmer of something glistening and my heart dropped.  I felt the rough edges and pulled it up to the light.  Was it?  Yes…  Broken glass.  From the accident.  Her window or mine?  I cringe again at the image of the sickening crunch.  I thought we had wiped all the traces away!  Did you know shards of glass...