4 Months Out

Jason and I are about 4 months out from Norah's death. I have not written a blog in what feels like a while. Today I feel pulled to type out how I feel. Jason and I have described these last few weeks as feeling harder than the first month. We aren't being carried anymore; we're walking. And walking is tiresome, takes energy, perseverance, and strength I didn't know existed inside of me. There's also the prospect of trying for children soon, which takes on it's own emotions, pretty much every emotion in the book. Add some hormones into that recipe along with grief, and you get the picture, a broken mess -- me.

Anger still is strong. So much so that I took a cardio kickboxing class on Sunday, punching the air as though I could envision punching circumstances and occasionally people's faces. How's that for total honesty?

I feel God calling me deeper, to fill a deeper place. The hardest part for me, right now in all of this, is to want to fill the deep emptiness with something other than God. It doesn't have to be anything crazy, like drugs, but things other than God -- my own control, for example. And when hope feels low and the emptiness is real, there is a challenge to the faith that comes. God, can you really fill all my emptiness? Can you really heal the deepest recesses inside of me? And if so, why does it feel that instead of hope coming in like a rushing wave it's coming in like a trickling stream, taking painful amounts of patience?

Deep grief pushes tears out of you from places you never knew existed. I've begun to wonder when the tears will end and how many wrinkles will be formed from my crying faces (I think that's supposed to be sarcastic). Never before have I felt so pushed, challenged, forced to live in a place of faith.

But the mercies are new everyday. Even when grief rolls over into the next day, the mercies are still there. Hope trickles in slowly. I feel like I have come through some rite of passage through this time, surviving the un-survivable, living through the unlivable, and somehow I am still in one piece.

The Streams in the Desert devotional has been very helpful. I'll share this from July 26th:
"There are times when things look very dark to me -- so dark that I have to wait even for hope. It is bad enough to wait in hope. A long-deferred fulfillment carries its own pain, but to wait for hope, to see no glimmer of a prospect and yet refuse to despair; to have nothing but night before the casement and yet to keep the casement open for possible starts; to have a vacant place in my heart and yet to allow that place to be filled with no inferior presence -- that is the grandest patience in the universe. It is Job in the tempest; it is Abraham on the road to Moriah; it is Moses in the desert of Midian; it is the Son of man in the Garden of Gesthsemane."

So, here I wait.