There has been a sense of “heavy” on our hearts lately. There are
seasons that we enter and as my husband told a group of grieving teachers this
week… “The only way through- is through." Oh, how that trip “through” is so
hard.
"Loss" has been a good summary for our past few months. August
began with the loss of the most influential person of my life. My mam-maw was
for no better term, a “saint” of the Lord. Not that she was perfect, but she
lived a life that bled into other people’s lives. There were neighbors, post
office people, nurses, church youth who are now grown adults, and her
family all there to remember the vast impact that she had had on every person's life. One small 4ft 11” woman... and yet her influence was enormous in the role
she played in so many people’s lives, relative or not. What was so great about
Mam-maw is that she was Mam-maw to every single person she met. She was
generous, and I can’t remember a single memory of my past without her there for
it all. She was about to celebrate her 93rd birthday and was ready
to meet her Savior… Yet for me, it was still a huge portion of my life that I was
not ready to let go.
This week, our community school faced significant loss as
well. They lost a colleague, friend, and
teacher. If that wasn’t hard enough, the school experienced more loss
when a young girl took her own life ending her Junior year in high school and
the rest of her life prematurely.
Getting “through” is sometimes the part where we stand at
the doorframe to loss and don’t want to enter. We want to bypass the
door completely, deny there is a path through, and hope for a quick “round
about” to keep us from feeling such strong emotions of loss and pain.
No matter how fast you run or walk in avoidance to the
loss, it will always catch up to you. It is just a matter of time when it will
find you and force you “through”.
I am reminded every September 2nd of the loss of a spouse to adultery and his choice to walk away from the kids and I.
Every year it is a reminder of the life lost because of one person’s choices. That choice resulted in a lifetime of loss for my
children and for myself as holidays and events come and go. We grieve the very person who
should have shared these milestones. It is also loss of
the future that was birthed the day we said “I do”.
It also
is a reminder of the “going through” process. I stand amazed every anniversary
that the kids and I are “through”. We see the past as hurdles and obstacles but
also cherrish great victory as we have crossed the ribbon at the end! It is a reminder of many treasures and
rewards that we have received by walking through the dark door of loss. It is “through” this experience I have found great treasures, illuminated by God. He continues to pull us in and show
us even greater riches. This is the work that is “greater than we can ever
imagine” that he speaks of.
Neil Anderson brought this to “light” as I was reading
his book Victory Over the Darkness… John declared. “In Him was life, and the life
was the light of men” (John 1:4). I
paused as I reread the passage. This time it began to reveal something to me that
I had been misreading before. I had always thought that Jesus was “light”…. But
what the verse says is that, “In Jesus
was “LIFE” and that “LIFE” was the light of men. I paused because I have always read this backwards.
I always translated it this verse like this: In Jesus, he was light therefore
he had life.
You may wonder why this matters. Often we stand at the door
of loss and grief and say, “Where Lord is your light in this darkness?" We
assume that Jesus is our light in darkness, and when life is dark- we get a
sense of him being distant or void. In fact, what if he wants us to not look for
His light at all? What if he wants us to remember that “light” isn’t really
what he wants us to find look for in our darkness?
It is “Life”.
He wants us to find “life” in the midst of
the valley of the shadow of death. Our hope in God fills us with “Life”
even in the midst of loss in death. That ultimately is the switch to the “lights”
that will then illuminate the path through. Many things look like light, but it is the life in Christ that ultimately lights the way.
A few weeks ago we celebrated as a family and for us as couple a new life
that was going to our first child together. Andy & I were over the moon,
when the big “YES” came up on our pregnancy test! We celebrated!! We bought an
adorable robe and slipper set with the most adorable little whale on the pocket. (gushing over the cuteness) This was a "celebration gift" for our newest member of our family a baby that in 8 months would be
ours to hold and to cherish and to love. Andy loves to sport his robe and
slippers all around the house and it is his preferred choice of clothing. So it
felt like the perfect way to celebrate the news.
There looms such a conflict about “when” to celebrate a child/pregnancy
publicly. A friend reminded me today that every pregnancy and life is worth
celebrating, regardless of the timeframe. We ultimately choose to celebrate our news early with our parents,
siblings and close friends. It was great joy for us to share the news of our
baby on the way! We believed God for great things and wanted to share his gift
with the people we loved. It was amazing to share this with Andy’s mom as this
was her first experience hearing that her son was going to have his first baby!
The excitement and extreme joy over this life, was amazing to witness as each
sibling burst into tears of happiness for the expectant life we all already
dearly loved.
For whatever reason, shortly after celebrating life, the
pregnancy failed. I am not a fan of the
term “miscarry”. I feel it makes me feel as if I “miss” carried this precious
life I so longed to see hold and cherish.
Women rarely talk about the loss of pregnancy.
Our culture is very vocal about the abortion issue yet remains very quiet and
hidden when a tiny forming life is lost to a passionate mother & father wanting nothing
more than birthing their new baby.
I sat alone
in our small cottage expecting that at any moment what was greatly expected
would be passing from me without my control. Everything in you as a person
fights for life, even when it is ending. We go to great lengths to save our self from harm. It is true
for a mother carrying a child. We fight for them as much as we would fight for
our own life. I sat in our small bathroom, tears flowing down
my cheeks at the reality that I could do nothing to save what I cherished so
much, this little life that was to be our first "Baby Bautz".
I sat there thinking had this been one of our
other 4 children life would have stopped completely for a while. We would have had a
funeral, time to grieve, and a service to share their “life” with others. This kind of loss
was deeper than I had expected. We are still overwhelmed with great
sadness as we have to wait to meet our first child together. We both have been staring at the
door of loss and to be honest… we didn’t want to
walk through. My heart was shattered with the overwhelming disappointment. It still is heavy, and I often want to find a way to go around the pain. In one moment, we were celebrating the gift of “Life”, planning in a season of
expecting great things. In the next moment, starting down a path of death, loss…and waiting.
A.W. Tozer wrote about the period between the resurrection of Christ and the coming of the Holy Spirit. The disciples had just witnessed the crucifixion of Jesus. They rejoiced in his resurrection only to discover his preparation to leave again and reunite with his Father. Imagine the disappointment. Tozer explains this process for disciples as “a short period, which intervened
between our Lord’s resurrection and down-coming of the Holy Ghost."
He continues to explain that the Lord’s command to the disciples was to
“Tarry!”; or linger in expectation for “greater” things to come. He goes on to
say, “You are about to receive that which has been promised. Your expectations
are about to be fulfilled, your hopes realized. Therefore, don’t do anything
until it comes.”
Tozer goes on to say something that has been profound for
this time of loss and grief for Andy and I. It felt discouraging for us to have been moving forward toward our desire to expand our family with a baby only to be put in a holding pattern. We felt as if we had made progress and then were moved back, paralyzed and not going anywhere in the direction we had hoped. Tozer encourages us by saying , “I might say here that
sometimes you are going farther when you are not going anywhere; you are moving
faster when you are not moving at all; you are learning more when you think you
have stopped learning.”
Here we are…. Standing still at the doorframe of loss- and
I believe God is okay if we “tarry", with expectation. God recognizes our delay and waits
for us to seek his strength to walk “through”. He wants us linger in His presence and to expect great things. It is in our lingering that He will encompass us with “Life”. When we are full of Him, it automatically
begins flipping on the switches to light up the dark path that we must venture through.
Today, I want to linger with great expectation with everyone going through loss and
grief. Be reminded that when
we are standing at the doorframe of loss and grief that
Jesus is our “LIFE”. It is in him we can still be "living" while feeling the
immense pain of the death and loss in our lives.
In deed, the only way through is through. The treasure we truly find in darkness is LIFE in
the midst of death. It is our hope in a Savior that didn’t leave us alone but said, “Tarry, expect greater things…” And thus, He sent us the
Holy Spirit to fill us with His Life in his absence; creating light for us to pass through the
darkest of situations with the greatest anticipation of things to come.
