Through the Valley of the Shadow

"Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, 

I fear no evil, for You are with me. Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me." 

Psalm 23:4

Truth be told, I was nervous today.  

I had the opportunity to go and be in the presence of a young couple who are walking in the shadow of death. My husband is a pastor, and I asked him if I could join him as he went to meet with a young couple from our church to pray for their 5 day old son. It was a long trip to the hospital, in a car with no air conditioning, but I would gladly make it again to pray for this sweet child and to be in this place, where angels reside. 

I once walked through the valley they are traveling in, the valley that lies in the shadows of death. The unknown of what will come around each bend in the road. It is a tricky path, this rocky terrain, and it is one that is better traveled with the Shepperd near by.

Facing the hallways of the NICU valley with the tiny tubes, the nurses with needles, the doctors who share so little, the terminology that is so unfamiliar--and all with the most precious part of yourself in the clear plastic cradle. There are moments to celebrate, and then moments to grieve and they sometimes happen within a breath of each other. 

Truth be told, I was nervous yesterday. 

I had the occasion to go to the funeral of a young woman, a childhood friend of my daughter who is now walking on the other side of the shadow. I approached her parents at the church, because I knew from my time walking through their valley, that the best thing I could do, was give them another familiar face on this day. To allow another synapse to be fired in their brains and to release more memories. Precious and priceless memories. 

I once walked through the valley they are traveling in, the valley that lies in the shadows of death. The finality of what came around that sharp bend in the road. It is a tricky path, this rocky terrain, and it is one that is better traveled with the Shepperd near by. 

Facing the hallways of things that I will not ever do with my daughter. Watching as children her age grow and mature, but she forever remains as she was. Knowing that she is complete in the presence of her Savior, but that means she isn't with me. And so, missing her becomes part of what draws me nearer to He who could have saved her, but loved us both more.

Truth be told, I am not nervous for tomorrow. 

I don't know what will happen. I do not know if I will walk in a shadow of death tomorrow, but I do know that if I do, I won't walk it alone. The impulses I have to pursue God originated with Him. As much as I long after Him to walk with me through these valleys, He longs for it even more. And, ultimately, while I may walk through the shadow of death, there is another shadow that shields my heart.

"Because you are my help, I sing in the shadow of your wings.

I cling to you; your right hand upholds me." 

Psalm 63:7-8

Blogging along with Spiritual Sundays

That Was Yesterday

This is the 16th Anniversary of the day that Molly didn't wake up. I have been through this day 15 other times and each one is different. Unique with the passing of time and especially with the aging of my other children. In the beginning we would have a "Molly Meal" where we would eat only Molly's favorite foods for dinner. We would spoon Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, homemade mashed potatoes, and Cheerios onto our Wedding china. That was all we would eat. It worked for several years, and then the children grew older and one year they looked at their plates and said, "Where's the chicken?" They had outgrown the "Molly Meal".

When we lived near the cemetery there were years we could go there and visit Molly's grave. The kids would choose a toy from their room to be able to leave something for Molly. It was very sweet to watch them struggle at first with the idea of giving up a Happy Meal toy while they looked around their rooms and then to see the transformation when they arrived at the grave sight. They were eager to place it on the headstone in the perfect spot and to now go home without it. My mind's eye still sees my elder son very clearly, bending down to kiss the headstone of his little sister before we loaded back into the minivan. But, life has gone on without this little 19-month-old Angel, and now there are no more Happy Meal toys in the rooms.

Then there was the awful year that I forgot to get sad. It was a Sunday morning and I was busy getting my children ages 9, 7 and 4 ready for church (being married to a Pastor meant that on Sunday mornings I was a "Single Mom"). I was so frantic in our grooming that I didn't catch the "date". I made my way into the sanctuary, with the church bulletin in hand and settled into the service. Then I looked at the bulletin and there was the date. January 31, 1999. I jumped up and practically ran to the Ladies room, holding in tears of shame. One of my closest friends followed me (Don't you love women?) and was ready to know. To help. To listen. I was so overwhelmed with grief and shame. I felt like the worst mother alive. How could I have forgotten the date? She had only been gone for 4 years and I had lost her date in the shuffle of our lives! My sweet friend looked at me lovingly and told me the truth. She explained that this date was forgotten because I was a GOOD Mom. I was concerning myself with the lives of the living children in my home. This pleased God and would certainly have pleased Molly.

Yesterday I got a text message from my husband telling me that he was struggling and asking me to pray for him. He was thinking about Molly, he said. Fortunately, I was doing well, I was aware of the approaching date and I had been expressing my grief through this outlet of writing--I wasn't afraid of what this anniversary might hold. Yes, I was doing so well actually that I was able to remind him of the encouraging truths about where she is and how much God loves us.

That was yesterday.

Today, I woke and within two minutes wished I hadn't. I stayed in bed too long with the covers pulled up over my head. When I finally couldn't fake sleep any longer, I reached for my phone and sent my husband this text message: "Everything hurts"

I knew that I should really be reaching for my bible to find comfort in the Psalms. I knew that if I would just say those words in the form of a prayer that God would help me get through this day. But, I refused.

Now, please understand, I don't like pain and I do trust God. I promise. It's just that sometimes the pain is so deep that I don't even want to feel the edge of it. It's like handling a razor blade. One wrong move and I could lose a finger. If I allow myself to feel, then I am going to feel everything. And everything hurts.

I continued my morning routine of shower and coffee and stayed away from my Bible with busyness of housework. However, because I am insanely A.D.D., blow drying my hair is akin to being duct taped to a chair and staring at a blank wall, so I decided to "go online" while I used the dryer. (Yes, I really do this--often.) I started with my friend's blog 365 Days of Prayer. Words so sweet, my heart was touched as I longed for her faithfulness. Everything I believe about who God is was affirmed and I felt God whisper to me..."Do you think I can't find you, Jackie? Did you think I wouldn't pursue you on a day like today?" But, I dried my tears and continued to pull back into myself and away from His plan for today.

I went to my email and I opened the first message which was an update from the Women of Faith blogsite I began to read these words from Marilyn Meberg:

"Whether they surface frequently or rarely, we all have strong feelings that impact us, causing tears to spring up unexpectedly, sending grief sweeping over us “out of nowhere,” or pushing us to behave in specific ways. By studying these feelings and by remembering back to the events and issues that sparked them, we gain understanding that helps us cope."

My heart leapt, I may have even gasped, and then...tears. Lots of tears. When I had calmed myself down I grabbed onto the next line:

"The fact is, the human psyche can withstand almost any assault if we can find purpose in our lives in spite of that assault."

And, then I was sure of what I was going to do today. No matter how sad I felt, I was going to proceed with the purposes for today. The best way that I could acknowledge the anniversary this year was to go keep moving forward. Today I was going to go get a passport. Recently, I was accepted on an overseas Missions team that will be traveling to India in October. So, with puffy eyes and pale skin, I made my way to the post office today and filed my Application for a Passport. My picture was awful (everyone hates their passport photo anyway, right?), but for me, it was monumental to do it today.

16 years ago, I had to remind myself to breathe. One breath at a time as I wandered through the unimaginable. I was never alone, people I love crowded around but even in their best attempt they couldn't make the pain go away. Everything hurt. But, that was yesterday.

It's Kind of Like Spaghetti

On January 31st, about 2 hours before my daughter died, I was lying in bed with my baby girl, who I assumed had an upset tummy, and during those moments of half sleep and half wakefulness, I dreamed of her funeral. Or, should I call it a nightmare? It was an aerial view of the church we attended. Straight down I could see the people arriving and taking their seats. My mind obviously not fully awake as I questioned the presence of some, "Would he take a day off of work to be there?" I saw myself in the front row, all dressed in black.

The oddity of it still astounds me to this day, the ability to begin to prepare for something that would be crashing into our lives in a matter of moments. Was this the Holy Spirit? Or, perhaps it was the presence of Angels in my bedroom, as they came to surround my sweet daughter, and I, so relaxed in my half-conscious state, could see what they saw? I know that for us time is linear and what has not yet happened cannot be seen, but in the spiritual realm, isn't it all happening at once? It has become a paradox in my life to try to understand what actually happened and what I dreamed and could they be the same when the actual had not yet occurred.
Living with a strong faith in the Lord, I've grown accustomed to a certain amount of paradoxes and I was reminded of them clearly this week while reading, No Man Is an Island, by Thomas Merton:
"We become ourselves by dying to ourselves. We gain only what we give up, and if we give up everything, we gain everything. We cannot find ourselves within ourselves, but only in others, yet at the same time before we can go out to others we must first find ourselves. We must forget ourselves in order to become truly conscious of who we are. The best way to love ourselves is to love others, yet we cannot love others unless we love ourselves since it is written, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself'. But if we love ourselves in the wrong way, we become incapable of loving anybody else. And indeed when we love ourselves wrongly we hate ourselves; if we hate ourselves we cannot help hating others."
It's kind of like spaghetti. While it is in the box it is easy to see where each strand starts and where it comes to an end, but once you take it out and heat it up it becomes nearly impossible to see which strand is which, where one begins and the other ends. And so while we think we are living our lives walking on tightropes made of straight pasta, our spiritual life isn't that way. It's way more complex.
Over the years, the dream has been altered, with the actual event overpowering the nightmare in the details. I still see it from above. It's a flash and then gone, lasting only a second--not even two. It's obviously been an intentional choice to remember this dream, this brush with the supernatural. Or, perhaps, I couldn't forget it if I tried.

Truth Be Told

So, about a year ago I started writing this blog. I am super inconsistent, but since my audience is made up of family and friends I am able to get away with that. I write when I feel like sorting something out in my head. It saves me money on therapy and it helps my parents rest easy knowing that I am, for this month, still okay.

For those of you who follow me (and yes, I know, it's hard to understand how to use the Google Follow Button...you have to log in and create a profile and give them way too much information) you know that my writing tends to be sarcastic. I just write as I am. I just write about things that are happening in my life and most of things that are happening in my life are very ordinary and kinda silly at the same time.

The ironic thing is, that while most of you know who my family is, I rarely use their names when I am writing. I think that I do this to preserve some of their privacy. So, even though we all know who "The-Blonde-Who-Sometimes-Resembles-Venus-The-Goddess-of-Love" is...we don't say her name. We keep it to ourselves. We give her that place in cyber-space to be guarded and protected.

Recently, God placed it on my heart that I need to write about someone incredibly important in my life. I realized that I don't ever write about my daughter who died in 1995. I maneuver away from that subject like a balloon animal being chased by a porcupine. Well, I want to give you a warning that I am going to be writing about her. If I seem less funny, if I come across as a little melancholy, please be patient. God has led me to this place and I am convinced that it is good for me to share.

Pray for me. One of my writing friends warned me, "It's gonna hurt". That was a thought that I had considered only slightly, being more concerned with the idea that I won't know how to write without being condescending toward myself. But, after several days of the idea being confirmed and reconfirmed I am ready to the journey to a place I have fought to escape. I am ready to revisit a place that was devastatingly awful and unbelievably beautiful in the same moment. I am sure it will hurt, but when God knit together the events that brought her into my life and then took her out of my life, He also knew that one day I would need to write about Molly.

Even the best of friends cannot attend each other's funeral

Funerals are beautiful and happy or beautiful and sad. Yesterday, I got to go to the funeral for my Paternal Grandmother. She was born in 1920 and had raised 5 children. Those children led to 65 Grandchildren, Great-Grandchildren, and Great-Great Grandchildren. This alone made for a funeral that was beautiful and happy. And, as a believer, I know that she is now experiencing completeness and a fulfillment that she had ever known in this life.

As we were getting ready to go to the funeral I started to think about being born and the time when I added myself to her numbers. I was closer to the beginning of what would later be her legacy. I considered the moment of birth for the infant, the mother and the Grandmother. How different the experience is for each one—but my thoughts were more directly the infant and the Grandmother. I thought about my Grandmother’s possible reaction to my birth. I know that she wasn’t present—I was Grandchild number 9, 10 or maybe even 11 (some of us cousins are so close in age, I don’t remember who was here first). There had been babies born before me who had come out not breathing and some with special needs. I wasn’t an important birth—but even so, I am sure that I was newsworthy to her. Her only son now had a daughter. I was pink and sweet and I had fulfilled my only purpose up to this point. I was a girl. My brothers were boys born a year and a half apart and I followed as quickly as I could. In a time before Ultrasounds, my arrival was an unveiling of sorts. Had I been a boy, the entire dynamic of my family—as I now know it—would have been be altered. It was important that I didn’t fail in this first feat set before me.

It occurred to me that as Grandchildren and as Grandmothers we have certain unspoken appointments that we must keep. In a perfect world they happen in the correct order and with decades between them. I am 45 years old and my Grandmother was to be 90 this month. So, when I was born she was just about the same age that I am today. It was her role to acknowledge my birth and to celebrate the beginning of my life. At her funeral it was my role to acknowledge her death and celebrate her life in its entirety. She’s there when I am born and I am there when she dies. That’s the beauty of life.

And then there are the events that we don’t plan on attending. When a Grandmother attends a birth and then attends the funeral for that same person—the rules are broken and it is more difficult to find the beauty. I have heard it said, more times than I can count, “No parent should ever have to bury a child”. Having passed through that shadow of death and felt the sting, I agree with a hearty amen to that and I have decided that I want to have a new rule in my life. If I am there when you are born, then I don’t want to go to your funeral. But, to the fortune of things I cannot fully understand, I don’t make the rules.

Recently, I told my sister-in-law that I would be at her funeral—she could count on it. The only reason I wouldn’t be there would be because she had come to mine. There are several people in my life that I have that unspoken agreement with. Raging waters from a bursting dam won’t be able to keep me away from the funeral of some of the people in my life. Like a salmon returning to his place of birth—I will need to be there in the end to celebrate the time I had with certain people in my life. It won’t be for them, it will be for me.

For most of the next 3 or 4 decades, I hope to avoid funerals as a whole and attend many baby showers and births. That’s the plan, anyway. But, I have to say, that I don’t hate funerals as a whole. I love life too much to hate funerals. There is no other time that we are more aware of our humanity. Funerals are beautiful and happy or beautiful and sad. At least we know that they will always be beautiful, for every life, no matter how long it is lived is abounding with the potential for beauty!