Monthly Archives: April 2015

I fall so short sometimes.  I wake up with the best intentions and a heart just wanting and needing to praise and worship and I fall so short.

I am only human and I know God knows that and it comforts me.  He made me and he knows me and he loves me.

We sang Great is thy Faithfulness in church this morning and I love sitting in the very front and the music just vibrates through your whole body.  Every word saturates my soul and I pour it out to my Creator.

Great is Thy faithfulness!
Great is Thy faithfulness!
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed Thy hand hath provided;
Great is Thy faithfulness, Lord, unto me!

The tears start to flow because I believe in that mercy and that hand that hath provided and somehow gotten me through this unspeakable pain.  I believe…I believe that God is faithful.

Yet I am sitting in the front of the auditorium and suddenly I remember being there before.  Three months ago.  With my little boys…his… coffin… he was in there. He was not supposed to be there.  He was strong and vibrant and a beautiful spirit and he was not supposed to be in a box.  Not in this church.  Not in this church where I sing of God’s faithfulness.

I run out with mascara streaming down my cheeks and I sob. And sob. Until there is no more.

I think about how I miss him SO TERRIBLY its like I’m missing oxygen, I’m like a fish out of water…gasping for breath.

I’m so tired of turning my back on my children because of my tear stained eyes and my voice catching in my throat as I answer them.

I feel sick because there are no pictures up of him in my house.  I feel sick because I cannot look at his beautiful angelic face.  It hurts like a dull butcher knife carving out my heart.  When I am on facebook I don’t look at the pictures.  They are there but I don’t look.

I hate that his room is closed up and I have not gone in there in three months and I don’t know if I ever will again.

His baseball shoes are sitting in the garage.  I don’t dare touch them.  I don’t want to move them and I don’t want to look at them.  Oh how I loved to watch him play baseball.  To watch him pitch- like poetry in motion.  To watch him catch a ball at first base his arms and legs seeming endless…he was supposed to play baseball.  He was supposed to…

I feel sick because I am so so angry because he is gone and I don’t feel like that is faithfulness. I couldn’t sing it.  I couldn’t.

I’m stumbling right now.  Sometimes it just hurts so bad I don’t know how to fit my suffering into the category of “God cares for me.” I hope someday I understand.

Love- I understand

Salvation- I understand

Suffering and death. I don’t get it right now.

Romans 3:23-24

“For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, ²⁴ and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

I haven’t written in awhile.  A whole 11 days.  I don’t know what to say, except “God help me, I hurt. I hurt so bad.”

That probably sounds very strange- I was writing almost every day the first couple of months, and ideas would come to me, things to write about, things that I felt like should be said…

Then the pain just got too much.  The sting prevented me from writing.  Grief is a strange strange animal.  I have found it to get more real, more potent, more like a barbed wire strangling my heart.

I still don’t even want to believe it.  I can’t wrap my mind around it.  Its been three months since my baby died.  I will never, ever wrap my mind around it.  You might as well tell me the earth is flat.  The fact that he is never again walking this earth is inconceivable to me.

I am still consumed by thoughts of that day, the horrific-ness of it all, unable to get past images and feelings and terror.

I have learned what it is to suffer.  To really suffer. It has changed my whole life.  To learn to live with suffering.

I have learned to feel closer to Jesus through suffering.  I think about his life on earth and all the horror that he went through.  I think of the world and all the pain and hunger and loneliness and grief- our fallen world that Jesus just wants to wrap his arms around and redeem.  I realize I am part of that plan.

That is the key- I am part of that plan.  Every tear that falls from my eyes and every day I wake up with my stomach filled with knots and my heart so, so heavy I am part of that big picture.  I can wake up just wanting to GIVE UP because its TOO MUCH and I can’t. I can’t give up. He tells me about His plans.

¹¹ For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11

“Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.” Proverbs 3:5-6

I am listening to God.  I am trying to listening as hard as I can through the noise and cacophony of the world and what I hear is “do what Lucas would do.  Do what you know his heart would want. Carry out his legacy.  I made him and I know his beautiful heart and it was meant to change people.”

It is a pretty powerful thing to feel God giving you a purpose.  I am so thankful for others who have helped me carry out Random Act of Kindness Day and Teacher appreciation day, who have donated to the Lucas Van, who continue to pray for us and our mission.

Suffering is a powerful thing.  It brings us closer to God. It humbles us.  It makes us realize how very little the things of the world matter.  Suffering makes us realize that our time on earth is but a grain of sand on a beach, our human life is so infinitesimally  small compared to the glory we will experience in heaven.  I will admit, yes I feel like heaven cannot come fast enough.  We feel like our earthly life is dragging so slowly when life is hard.

“I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” Philippians 3:14

The suffering can be endured…because there is hope, there is a plan, and there is a prize. 

So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand. Isaiah 41:10

Today felt like black Friday. Cold, dark, desolate, hopeless.   I woke up with one sentence in my head. “He slipped through my fingers.” I tried to shake it off but I found myself slogging through my morning with that phrase running repeating over and over and over…

I had read it somewhere the night before.  It just was so heavy on my heart, that visualization of a priceless precious diamond, so rare it could be found no where else in the world, one of a kind- slipping out of my fingers into the depths of the ocean.

Except that diamond was a person, far more valuable than any object the world over, absolutely irreplaceable, and not just at the depths of the ocean.  If that were true I would search relentlessly, never ever stopping.

I felt lost and empty. Regretful. Hopeless.

So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

At one point I took a took a workout shirt of his that had just been hanging around that I kept throwing here and there hoping not to look at it- and I ventured downstairs.  To where his room is.  I have not looked in its direction nor ventured into it since the day of celebration of life.  I still do not know how I went down there to write the speech I had written that day.

His room is around the corner in the basement so I don’t have to see it unless I…walk around that corner.  I for some reason almost dared myself to do it, just approach the open door to throw the shirt it.  So I did.  The result was immediate scorching pain like a hot branding iron on my heart. To see the bed that had sat empty for nearly three months. That emptiness, that void that echoed my heart.  I ran upstairs sobbing.

So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed, for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.

I know God is there.  I know it.  I believe it with my whole being.  I know he is there when I don’t think I can feel him.  Today I felt an absence, a “why couldn’t you save my precious diamond?”  I truly felt robbed.  I felt feelings that I haven’t completely acknowledged before.  It was a terrible, terrible feeling.

Tomorrow is another day.  Another day that God will be there to wrap me in his blanket of mercy if I will let him.  He has NEVER left and will NEVER leave.

My Sunday is coming…someday I will join my diamond. The bonds of death have been broken. He is risen.

Behold, I am coming soon, bringing my recompense with me, to repay everyone for what he has done. I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, the beginning and the end.” Revelation 22: 12-13

Love is so powerful…the more you love someone, they say, the more you will grieve them.  Loving someone is taking that chance.  Giving them your whole heart with that possibility, that the unthinkable will happen.

That the never never never will happen to my child will happen.  We pour love into them, soak them in it…

then suddenly they are snatched away.

You are left, as I said in a facebook post, with the breath knocked out of you.

Traumatized.

Crushed.

What do you do when someone you have given your heart to is gone?

You keep loving them.  You can’t stop loving them.

I try so very very hard to picture him in heaven, to think of him in heaven, to make heaven his new home in my mind.  I just can’t.  Its not that I don’t believe he’s there.  It’s that he was JUST here with me.  My frail human mind still cannot comprehend what has happened.  I’m not in denial, its just beyond the point of my ability to cope.

I try so hard…to be normal…I took Brooklyn shopping for an Easter dress.  I was trying so hard.  The first thing we walked past in the store were men’s shirts and ties.  Right in front was a silvery grey shirt and purple striped tie like he wore to homecoming.  Then of course we had to walk through rows and rows of men’s clothes each step feeling more suffocating than the last.  Found a dress, then a quick stop in the kids department for socks.  Simple right? The boys clothes were front and center. Immediately a huge lump in my throat.  I thought of his childhood.  Just being a little boy.  My little boy who was supposed to grow up into a man.

He will never grow up into a man.  He was almost a man.  He looked like a man.  But he wasn’t.

I gave my whole heart to a boy almost man and I wouldn’t change one single thing.  About how much love I poured into him.  Every person I ever told about my son, while he was still alive, heard with a beaming smile how wonderful of a kid he was.  How he just amazed me with his maturity and kindness and how I had just really lucked out.  I told everyone how much I appreciated his helpfulness.  I could not stop the praise from bubbling out.  I knew I had something very rare in him.  I had an old soul.

It was worth it.  Not that I could have loved him any less if I tried.  It was worth every tear and every pang and stab of agony.  To have him for however long I could, to enjoy every smile and every hug and every “love you mama” even if it was only fifteen years.

I think…

If I could love him this much how much does God love us?

If my insufficient, meager ability to love feels this powerful how ever so much powerful is God’s love? The love of the God of the whole universe? The thought sends chills up my spine.

How greatly do we underestimate God’s love and his ability to care for us, as we bustle around like little ants only worried about the next problem and the next bump in the road.  It is a continuous struggle- the earthly pulling us down and the heavenly pulling us up.  We must let God’s love pull us up.  Lift our eyes to the heavens.  Feel his love bathing us.  That resplendent, omnipresent love offered to us purely because of his grace and mercy.

Jesus says, I give you my whole heart for all of eternity.

Psalm 103:11

“For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
    so great is his love for those who fear him”

“God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”

-Augustine