Live Like Lucas

Since 5:30 am this song has played in my head.

“On Christ the Solid Rock I stand

All other ground is sinking sand

All other ground is sinking sand

My hope is built on nothing less
Than Jesus’ blood and righteousness;
I dare not trust the sweetest frame,
But wholly lean on Jesus’ name.”

Hope.  I still have hope right? Yes. Yes I do.  Somewhere in the swirling anxious shaking agony I have hope. I don’t think I can bear this.  It can’t be true.  It can’t be true.  I am drifting in a sea of agony and torture, wanting to submerge myself and feel nothing.

“On Christ the solid Rock I stand. All other ground is sinking sand.”

I lay on the solid rock.  It is smooth and unyielding.  I am not drifting.  I have a rock.  It feels silky and yet impenetrable. The coolness feels good on my face. I cannot sink.

1. When darkness veils His lovely face,
   I rest on His unchanging grace;
   In every high and stormy gale,
   My anchor holds within the veil.
2. His oath, His covenant, His blood
   Support me in the whelming flood;
   When all around my soul gives way,
   He then is all my hope and stay.
3. When He shall come with trumpet sound,
   Oh, may I then in Him be found;
   Dressed in His righteousness alone,
   Faultless to stand before the throne.

I think these are some of the most beautiful words ever written.  When I feel I cannot be comforted, when I feel I cannot endure this pain, I will lay on the rock.  When there is too much darkness I am grasping for Jesus I will rest on his grace.

Grace: the free and unmerited favor of God, as manifested in salvation of sinners and bestowal of blessings.  His grace is my anchor.

When all around my soul gives way, He is then all my hope and stay.

On Christ the solid rock I stand.  Or if I cannot stand.  I will lay on it and know that there is a foundation under me. I will not sink.

In the early morning hours before I finally climb out of my cozy cocoon is when my mind really races.  Today it was in so many places, so many painful places, and yet glorious places as well.

I started thinking about the accident.  For the 40,000th time.  I feel nausea.  I wonder strange thoughts like “what did they write on his attendance record at school?”

I try to distract myself with thinking about how big God is.  My pain feels so big its crushing me.  I pray, “God in your infinite greatness take this pain away.”

How big is God? God cannot be measured.  He does not fit in a category.  There is no number or scale that can begin to quantify the God of the universe.  Yet he knows every hair on my head.  He knows every tear that falls from my face. As I ponder an infinite all creating God, I think of nature.

“I have lived pain and my life can tell: I only deepen the wound of the world when I neglect to give thanks the heavy perfume of wild roses in early July and the song of crickets on summer humid nights and the rivers that run and the stars that rise and the rain that falls and all the good things that a good God gives.”  -Ann Roskamp

Lucas loved nature. To love nature is to love God. That is why Goodwillie was his happy place. This quote by John Ruskin could be his mantra:

“Sunshine is delicious, rain is refreshing, wind braces us up, snow is exhilarating; there is really no such thing as bad weather, only different kinds of good weather.”

God is BIG. God is GREAT. God hand created the tiniest flowers to the mighty oak trees. My pain though very real and visceral to me pales in comparison to WHAT GOD IS.

“Do you not know? Have you not heard? The LORD is the everlasting God, the Creator of the ends of the earth. He will not grow tired or weary, and his understanding no one can fathom.”

Isaiah 40:28

I don’t know if I should write today.  I don’t want to inflict the pain I am feeling on other people.  It doesn’t seem fair.  It’s Sunday- God’s day.  Throngs of people are going to church and singing his praises and worshiping at the feet of God Almighty.  It is good and right.

I know there are others though, like me, who feel so lonely and abandoned.  Inconsolable and unreachable. Every time I have a bad day I think, this is at bad as it can get.  Yet another day comes and I realize I was wrong.  Yesterday I had the most intense pain and anxiety and hopelessness it wrapped around me like a boa constrictor.  I could not read songs or verses. They did nothing to loosen the grip. I truly lost hope.  I did not want to exist.  I want so deeply to be there for my family but I did not want to live.  I do not want to die and leave my children, husband, mother, father, sister…yet how I felt seems incompatible with life.  I will not give up though. God wants me to live. I know he loves me.

As I lay in bed in the afternoon yesterday I took sleeping pills and prayed God please let me sleep.  I lay there for hours, tortured.  Then a verse popped into my head.

What is faith?

“Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”  Hebrews 11:1

I kept repeating it to myself over and over as I lay there tortured and gradually felt some peace creep in.  Little by little. Drop by drop.  Until I finally fell into blessed sleep.

Then I woke up this morning to these verses from my sister and instead of feeling inconsolable and unreachable I let it seep into my bones.

Ephesians 16:21

“I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, ¹⁷ so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, ¹⁸ may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, ¹⁹ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

²⁰ Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, ²¹ to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.”

Christ will dwell in our hearts through faith. Even in the most utmost misery. When we can’t feel him. When we don’t know where to turn. He is able to do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine.

I wake up and my eyes are wet.  I have been dreaming of him, for the first time since the accident.  I don’t remember much about the dream except he was smiling.  Of course he was smiling.  This is the first time I have woken up crying.

Oh the sorrow, it envelopes me. The pain soaks into my bones.  That constant, constant, ache of something that will never be again.

I have been able to picture his face again with out the stabbing pain, just a gentle ache.  His beautiful face.  So strong.  I would touch his cheek sometimes.  I remember how his skin felt.  He had blonde hairs on his chin he would shave every once in awhile.  I would tease him about it, look how long your chin hairs are! We would laugh about it.  I would tell him how handsome he was and he would say “no way Mom”, he would laugh, “I’m a 5.” He always hated how his eyes weren’t perfect and he had a little acne and his hair was rarely how he wanted it.

He was gorgeous. Just gorgeous.

From his hard earned biceps to his quick running feet he was a masterpiece. His long fingers could pick up any instrument easily, shoot a bow and arrow like an expert, write an articulate essay.  They would rub my back and change his brothers diaper.  He would shoot his BB gun and hit a squirrel from like, a bajillion feet. Throw a baseball at over 80 mph.

This was two years ago. I swear he owns shirts.

This was him on December 30. Just before his 15th birthday.

His brain, oh his brain.  He was so brilliant.  He could beat the pants off anyone in trivia.  He had such perserverence after his infection left him with some little issues that became more and more apparent as the work got harder.  Some things came so easily to him.  Other things that should have come easily did not.  I would ask him about a grade and he would cry.  I studied so hard Mom, he would say.  He was that passionate about his grades.  His was going be a doctor.  He just couldn’t always keep it all together.

In my dream he was smiling. If I could only see that smile one more time.

Feel his face one more time. Feel his arms around me one more time.

I wish, for one minute that someone else could feel THIS inescapable pain. THIS ever present agony. THIS endless torture.

I know the answer before I ask it.

Isaiah 53:3 “He was despised and forsaken of men, A man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.”

Jesus weeps with me.  He knows my pain.  He will wipe every tear from my eyes.

Why didn’t I see God before?

I thought I did. Yet i didn’t.  I wasn’t really opening my eyes to him.  How life could have been different had I opened my eyes.  I didn’t think I really NEEDED him.

I woke up this morning with a sense of peace.  I think I accepted for the first time that Lucas wasn’t coming back.  Now to type that it hurts so much but when I first woke up I God saying, “I have him now.  I’m sorry he can’t be with you.  He is standing in the sun with me. My loving arms are wrapped around him.”

I just wonder why I didn’t see God before. Hear him speaking to me.

Now he is everywhere, in everything,  I also had a picture in my mind when I woke up of a beautiful, colorful, intricate mural that represents God.  I had sunglasses on before.  I wasn’t really seeing all of the mural, in its brightest colors.  What could I have seen if I had really looked before, if I had taken the sunglasses off? I know he was there before.  I know he is here now. I know he will be tomorrow.

A beautiful mural is the way I think about seeing God right in front of me when I wasn’t really looking.  However his hand has been in every. single. thing. since January 16.  The deluge of support.  My friends that surrounded me and we bonded like superglue.  They were there, just waiting, for God’s whisper to go into action. God’s hands and feet have been scrubbing my floors and toilets. Reading to my kids. Making me the most scrumptious meals imaginable.  The way my family has been my stronghold. There to keep me away from the edge. The way certain people are always in the right place at the right time.

The stories that have pouring in about my son teaching me so much I didn’t even know.  I knew how much I loved him before, I just had no idea how many lives he had touched.  I do feel like I lost I bright shining star, but that light will not go out.  We won’t be able to see him but his light will lead our way.  I always thought Lucas was too good for this world.

I was right.

I cry out to God, why didn’t I see you before? Truly see you? It took being stripped bare. Experiencing a loss so colossal everything else just fell away.  I felt there was nothing left of me. Nothing but bare broken skeleton.  What’s to live for when you lose your firstborn son? Your treasure? Your golden boy? Your beautiful baby…?

Now I have nothing to live for but Jesus.

I am so glad that God (and I think Lucas ) are propelling me forward to write.  It is so therapeutic for me.  I wake up thinking of something and immediately I feel like I must type it out, it’s bursting out of me.

Lucas was such a gift.  Such a blessing to everyone.  I knew it from when he was little and his kindergarten teacher described him as kind. So kind. Then his first grade teacher fell like love with him (I know because she’s my friend) and saw things in him maybe I didn’t recognize yet.  He was different.  She told me “he’s going to be homecoming king someday.” That’s the kind of thing a mother never forgets.

Then he went through a terrible illness where we nearly lost him.  He came out with a big piece of skull missing.  He never complained.  He didn’t complain when he had to stop snowboarding and ice skating and sledding.  He couldn’t play baseball or basketball or really anything.  He could bowl. So he bowled.  He was awesome at it.

He was just happy to be alive.  Happy to be at Goodwillie where he could enjoy nature to its fullest.  Immersed in trail guiding, leaf collecting, canoe building, drawing with Woody, eating outside in the snow. He loved everything they did there.  That he made it into Goodwillie is purely amazing- he simply soaked it up.  During a time in his life where he could have been upset and angry he was simply full of joy.

I’m not going to do his entire life bio here.  Mostly because I have a two year old next to me who needs a diaper change.  All his life I knew he was a gift.

In the book Lament for a Son by Nicholas Wolterstorff he describes not knowing how much he loved his son until he was gone. I knew how much I loved Lucas.  I knew with every cell in my being what I had.  Something one in a million.  One in a hundred million.  A parent could not POSSIBLY love a child more.

Does that make it harder that he is gone? I want to say yes but it is also no.  Every parent that loses a child has a huge hole in their heart.  It is terribly horribly painful.  Remembering Lucas as a physical person right now is like putting my hand in a fire.  Picturing in my head him holding his baby brother or at the baseball mound or walking in the door from school – just cut my arm off instead.  I can type about it but I don’t really see it in my head.

Loss is loss.  However I am just so grateful.  That God gave him to me for a little while.  That he could make an impact on so many people.  That God blessed me with this child that I always knew was too good for this earth.  The person that he was is the person that will be remembered.  His legacy will make an impact on this earth if I have to stand on the street corner handing out LIVE LIKE LUCAS bracelets.

He was too beautiful just to be just lost.

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Up at 6 again. I hate this. My bed was my comfort, where I could wrap myself in a cocoon of warm blankets and forget that the world exists. Now its only a comfort if I’m asleep. When I’m lying in bed awake its when my mind processes things. Terrible, horrible things. The way I saw my beautiful, strong handsome boy moaning in the snow covered with blood. In the ER after the life had gone out of him and it already didn’t look like Lucas. I could barely touch him. He looked beaten up, battered, like he had suffered. Pictures of things no one should ever see. No mother especially. I try SO HARD to think of something else but…I can’t.

I put some music on and pretend I’m on a beach. It doesn’t work. I’ve been on so many beaches with Lucas. It seems there is no escape.

I was told yesterday I should write in a journal. This is what I want to write:
NO.
NO.
NO.
NO.
NO.
NO.
NO.
On every page. Then,
This is not fair God.
This is not fair God.
This is not fair God.
This is not fair God.
This is not fair God.
On the other side.

They say God doesn’t give us more than we can handle…..really?
So for the rest of life I have to have nightmares of crumpled bodies. Every time I see my family sitting around the table there is someone missing. I can’t look at pictures of him right now. Every vacation, holiday, birthday,graduation- that tall comforting presence will not be there. Seeing anything that had to do with him- gyms,workout clothes, protein shakes, baseball gloves, violas, snowboards, hunting bows- I could probably name a thousand things right now that will cause me heartbreak. I still have to go through his clothes. His ginormous shoes. See the hand prints they made of him in the hospital. I can picture them in my mind- his hands were BIG. Long thin fingers that were skilled at so many things.

I know I will go on. Yet I feel like God has given me too much. Too much.

Who am I to judge what God deems right?

In the Bible he tells the story of Job, man of God. He was a devout and faithful servant of the Lord who lost EVERYTHING he had. His crops, his livestock, every one of his ten children.

Do you know what he said?
“Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return. The LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.”
Job 1:21

I don’t think I can handle this…but God does.

One of Lucas’ VERY favorite books when he was little is Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel. It is a book about friendship.  I had kind of forgotten about it until my 2 year year old pulled it out of the archives the other day. I hadn’t seen its tattered pages in quite sometime.

As I was reading it to him, tears were rolling down my face.  It is a “Lucas” book.

The first story is about how Toad doesn’t want to get up in the spring and enjoy the sunshine.  Frog comes over and tries to get him out of bed but Toad just won’t budge. He is grumpy.   He eventually has to change the calendar page to get Toad out of bed.  He wants his friend to enjoy the beauty and glory of spring.

The next story is about how Frog is not feeling well.  The roles are reversed. Toad comes over to Frog’s house and sees he is looking “green” (that part always makes me laugh) and tells him to get in bed and makes him a cup of hot tea. Then Toad wants to tell Frog a story to help him feel better.  He walks in circles, dumps water on his head, and bangs his head on the wall to think of ideas.  Until he is feeling sick.  So Frog gets out of bed and tells Toad to get in. He then proceeds to tell Toad a story.

The stories go on and on: Frog tries to protect Toad from embarrassment in front of the other animals when he wears his bathing suit.  Frog helps Toad search high and low for a lost button.  They collect numerous buttons during the search so Toad sews Frog a special button covered jacket.

Every story is full of Frog and Toad putting each other first.  What happens then? They are GREAT friends.  Inseparable friends.  They know the other will always have their back. What a powerful message.  I think about friendships a lot because Lucas struggled with that. I know that he knew how to be a friend. He just didn’t feel like he had many true friends at school and it caused him great sadness.  All I have heard since his passing is that he had many people who liked him respected him.  Considered him a friend.  If only he had known.

If only he had known.

I thank God he had Christian and Jakob.  Their friendship ran deep, through many trials.  They experienced life together.

My take on all this is not only is true friendship selfless but you need to tell others and show others that they are your friends.  Invite them to hang out or go to a game or a movie.  Make them feel included.  You NEVER know who is lonely. Very few show it on the outside.  Yet that invite to experience real human interaction may be the one that keeps them afloat.  As the old saying goes, To have a friend you must be a friend.

Yesterday was bad.  I wasn’t a blubbering mess all day, but being together just with my husband and kids (which hasn’t happened in over two weeks) was difficult.  Everyone in my family is going to grieve differently and we were seeing all kinds of grief. Anger, irritability, crying at what appears to be nothing, general grumpiness.  For me I was just tired all the way down to the marrow in my bones.

First of all-  church.  I will never miss church again unless there is a typhoon, hurricane, or 7 feet of snow.  However getting my children ready is like running a marathon. OK, a short one but its a short uphill one.  They don’t know what to wear.  They don’t want to wear what I pick out.  Someone forgot to shower….hmm how can we cover that one up.  Where’s the other sock.  I lost my coat.  I don’t want to go.  Then everyone is finally in the car and I can’t find my purse, I need a waterbottle, and a safety pin.  With all the mounds of junk in the house I can’t find one safety pin.  Getting ready for church is a less than desirable activity.

So we finally make it to church, and of course that is awesome.  I feel the word to every song like its beating in my heart. One song about Jesus laying down his life almost broke me down but my friend Steph was there to hold me hand.  The preaching is always so spot on. Jeff Manion is a superstar preacher.  In his humble, gentle way he weaves an intricate tapestry of God’s word and our lives in a way that makes it feel like he is speaking only to you.  If you are not feeling as inspired maybe you should try Ada Bible.  It leaves me in awe every time.  Like a laser pointer of God’s grace and love and mercy is pointing right at my life.

So after getting lunch in the bellies of four cantankerous children my husband said “we are going to go to the gym.” I could have said no but I didn’t want to.  I knew he needed me to help the kids get ready for swimming, Well mostly he wanted me to work out.  Ugggggghhhhhhhhhhhh. NOOOOOOOOO.  So after he got them in the pool, instead of heading to the elliptical I decided spur of the moment to go in the hot tub.

That was a very good decision.  It felt like the jets and hot water were just soothing away all the pain.  Then someone next to me, a Mom and daughter started talking about basketball.  Lucas had played some basketball until his head injury (a MRSA infection,he had to have blood clot removed, had skull removed then put back) when he was ten.  Then he played one season last year.  He tried out for FHC’s team and made it but ultimately decided not to play because he wanted to focus on academics.  It was a struggle for him to maintain his grades the last couple of years because he was having memory and focus problems most likely from the previous infection.

So as this Mom and daughter are talking and sitting in the hot tub, it feels so healing but tears are starting to stream down my face.  Then I hear her say something about a game for Lucas.  I immediately sit up, open my eyes and say ‘that’s my son!”

Then I learned who the daughter was.  It was Annalee Konsoer-Rose.  I am sure many of you have heard of her.  She is a FHE senior and outstanding basketball player who has been battling a spinal cyst.  After talking with her for minutes I knew she was an old soul like Lucas.  She has that heart for others.  She had heard of Lucas and immediately felt a connection. She was trying to come up with something to do to honor him at her school.  She offered to distribute the Live Like Lucas bracelets.  I was so blessed to have spoken to her.  I knew immediately God has sent us to the same place at the same time.  As we were talking in the hot tub and I was telling her more about Lucas’ life and what kind of kid he was, everyone in the hot tub started crying.  I told them about my blog.  God touched other lives and I was encouraged by a simple hot tub visit.

So my bad day wasn’t so bad after all.  Its just getting through those tough moments.  Its about building up the resolve and determination to carry on.  Beautiful things will happen.

I think of my road as rocky, thorny, sometimes smooth and sometimes quicksand.  Uphill and downhill.  Jesus does not promise it will be easy.  He promises he will hold my hand, guide me, and light the way.

As David says in Psalm 119:105, “Your word is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path.”