big picture

What is this thing we are doing? I find myself asking myself that so often as I get caught up in LIFE and everything its “not” supposed to be but yet it creeps in…slowly…unintentionally…

I wake up to my girls fighting every morning.  A 12 and a 6 year old sharing a room=bad news.  6 year old has some strange and disconcerting habits that 12 year old chastises 6 year old for which results in crying and hitting.  Every morning.  Broken mom ( that’s me) has yet to figure out how to curb this issue.  Also 9 year old is very sensitive and tends to freak out over many many many things.  Better this year than last, for sure.  Much better.  Yet many tears.

Not a good way to start a morning.  I get irritable.  Then I think, what am I doing? Every time this happens I think, I have experienced unspeakable loss, I should be able to handle this. This is nothing. Nothing. Ha. Ha.  I have been all of the way to the bottom, the cold dark, hellish bottom and a hectic morning should be like a bug on the windshield.

It just doesn’t work that way.  Life happens and in the moment I don’t do the right thing.  Sometimes I do some stuff more right ( this is my blog and more right is grammatically correct).  I hug more and encourage more and I am trying, not doing well, but trying, to be present more.  Emotionally and physically.  Yet I feel like so many, like a failure.

Few would understand, and for even fewer this may be true, but connecting with other children is harder after a loss.  Right or not right, that lost child looms larger than the ones that are physically present.  The Lucas shaped hole makes it easier for the others to slip through.  There is just no getting over or filling that Lucas shaped hole.  No one else fits in it.

Yet I keep trying. I have to.  I have to remember the big picture of this thing called LIFE that isn’t really about hectic mornings and crying and gnashing of teeth.  Its really about the God shaped hole that can be filled.  This is everything and all and completely what keeps me going.  Because (again my blog- grammer is optional) this is IT. There is nothing else.  The rest is all details.  I have seen that in a thousand different ways in the last almost 9 months.  People.  Gestures.  Situations.  Boards coming together. Live Like Lucas becoming a household name and affecting hundreds maybe even thousands. Who knows?  Basketball games in a public school where I got to talk about my sons FAITH IN GOD.

Here’s a beautiful one- someone I didn’t even know (at the time) messaged me on facebook and told me her son had decided instead of birthday gifts to have his friends donate to the LiveLikeLucas organization.  I was flabbergasted.  Then she dropped off the money- over $500.  6th graders. All these wonderful kids.

yes I spilled coffee on it.  I spill on everything.

She told me all about how excited they were to give.  They connected with LiveLikeLucas.  They don’t even fully know what it’s going to be (trust me there’s A LOT of planning going on) but they see the person that he was and the impact that has already happened and they are EXCITED.

I couldn’t even begin to describe to you the things that would have been so cosmically unlikely if the world was just a spinning unattended ball in the middle of space…no- there is someone in control.  Guiding, protecting and loving us.  Who created us just for the pure joy of loving us, send Jesus to redeem us, to redeem EVERYTHING.

Is that kind of hard for me to see redemption in the pain, the suffering? Yes- but its getting just a little clearer every day.  Will I ever understand fully how the loss my my precious child plays into this redemption? Not until I get to heaven.  I also don’t understand why little children die of starvation and students get gunned down in their classrooms.  Suffering is hard.  The hardest.

So what do we do with this, this life? This life that is so precious.  This life that does not belong to us, that we don’t even deserve to have.  We muddle through it and get disappointed in ourselves and feel like failures sometimes.

Yet we have to come back to big picture.  These awful mornings are like dots in a giant beautiful painting.  I feel like my son dying is a huge, gigantic, ugly black blob on the painting of my life- yet somehow I know that when God is looking at it he sees the whole thing- and it’s beautiful.  He created us in his image, with his artistic hand, with his omniscient being and he said to us, “I LOVE YOU.  I WILL ALWAYS LOVE YOU.  EVEN IF YOU HAVE AN AWFUL MORNING.   EVEN IF YOU CAN’T SEE YOUR WAY OUR OF A DARK TUNNEL.  I AM HERE.”