I honestly have a hard time sharing some of these sorrowful struggles of mine, but mostly the intimate windows into my heart. I know if you read my blog posts, it would seem quite the contrary. Most days I feel like Moses, bumbling over my words and telling God that there is NO way that HE has chosen the right gal to carry HIS Message! But then HE reminds me, "Who has made man's mouth? Or who makes the dumb, or the deaf, or the seeing, or the blind? Is it not I, the Lord? Now therefore go, and I will be with your mouth and will teach you what you shall say.”
(Exodus 4:11-12 AMP)
One thing I have learned from these past two years is this: Grief changes you into a different person than you used to be before the loss.
Sometimes I wonder if Conner would find me remarkably different because he is the one who has missed all this change. I see such a drastic difference in my mind and heart, but I wonder how many others (if any) notice the transformation?!?!
With the eye-opening perspective on life that grief brings about, I speak out on personal things, especially grief because I believe whole-heartedly that this is what God has called me to do. HE showed this Calling to me before my dear Conner passed away. At that point, I was in a waiting room, a holding pattern until my Conner's death. Then the opportunities began to come at me. At first I resisted some of them because it just made me plain mad that people were attracted to such horrendous hurt.
As God began to soften my heart, I began to see that God uses our pain to create beauty. HE has this unique way of increasing our capacity to love others through the hole that pain has tunneled through our weak hearts.
We most definitely have a choice what to fill that hole with. The bereaved face the temptations of bitterness, anger, dependency of many different forms, hopelessness, resentment, etc. The beauty with God is that HE allows us to chose HIM. HE lovingly reveals, but HE does not force.
So many times I am faced with the simplistic options of HOPE or HOPELESSNESS. Throughout the previous two years (and I suspect the rest of my life), I have stood at the crossroads of hope or hopelessness and been asked to chose. Not out of meanness or sadistic intents, but out of the beauty of increasing my faith in HIM at each turn. HE wants me to chose HIM. HE wants me to trust that HE can supply what I need to make it through anything. Because HE knows that a Believer filled with that kind of faith is shining more and more and more the Light that we are intended to display.
But what I want you to know is this: In my eyes, I struggle more than most people. I struggle with making the right choices. I struggle with faith. I struggle with hope because so many times I feel the weight of hopelessness bearing down upon me.
One of my struggles is viewing my children as the blessing that they are from the Lord. When you are happily married and you are at a point in life where you think, "I have never been more happy and content in my whole entire life," it is very easy to have the right theology and believe the Truths of God.
When disaster strikes, what was up is now down, what was clear is now so incredibly murky, and what is solid Truth is now clouded with the strongest emotions you have ever experienced in the entirety of your life. At this point it becomes very easy to lose faith in the "Good, Good Father."
I know that the Word teaches that children are a blessing from the Lord, but when all the weight of discipline, daily care, spiritual rearing, financial charge, and emotional mending is placed on your broken and, as far as one can tell, irreparable shoulders, the temptation to treat them as a burden or a task to be managed is luring.
So much like God's call to us to slow down and be still and know (acknowledge) that HE is God...this week my goal is to be still and enjoy these precious little gifts of mine. I will attempt to say "yes" more. To look into their eyes. To notice their laughs. To play with them. To not just see them as mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, but to sit and eat with them and enjoy the way they eat their food and to notice what they like and dislike. To take in more of who they are because I know that we are not promised tomorrow. To change my mind about the burden mindset that Satan tempts me with, and to realize that I have the four living, breathing, walking pieces of Conner that are left on this earth. That is something to be grateful for and to revel in!
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