Worship and Grief

What is worship but a natural response when in the presence of the wonderful aroma of Christ?

A pause.

A breath.

Goodness.

Delight.

A smile turns on the corners of your mouth.

Yes.

And there he is, my son, in his deep red and white striped polo shirt, khaki pants, slip-on sandals with socks, an old pair of my oversized sunglasses, twiddling his outgrown haircut, and throwing his planes around the yard with his sister as I sit in my greenhouse cross-legged on a sun washed pink chair. Here, in this sunshine, is my worship. I am grateful. I am in awe.

This endeavor to write in the public domain is a new one for me, one I always wanted to try and yet didn’t have the nerve or didn’t know how to give myself the platform or the time or the permission. So here I am to tell you that I don’t have a plan for how this is all to go. I do not know what all I might say or not say. My fear is that too much of my writing will have sad undertones. It is two days ago that I wrote the above description of my son. While writing it I thought perhaps I could ensure that my blog posts would be uplifting. I can write about how I worship in the little moments and all the ways that God has been faithful to me in this long painful season. And it is true, I can. I can do my best to keep it all positive and inspiring, but that wouldn’t be the whole truth and if I cannot share the whole truth then why should I share at all?

Instead of stopping at the beautiful, lets go deeper. Soon after the kids and I went back in the house the other day, my boy began having a very poor attitude and talked back to his mama. This is something I cannot tolerate, for it will not serve him well in life, so I disciplined him. Unusual for him, he got angrier and began yelling. I sat on the floor, pulled him down onto my lap and held him. He wanted me to let him go and he continued to fuss. I told him I would let him go when he showed me that he could control himself. The next thing I knew he was weeping, hard. He pressed his face into my chest and cried for a while. When he went to get up I asked him if he could tell me what upset him and why he was crying. He could not but he seemed calm and said he was ready to go play.

“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”
-C.S. Lewis

No sooner did I go into the kitchen to make supper than he came running back to me crying. I sat right there on the floor and he climbed on top of me and cried more. I encouraged him to let it all out and he must have cried for five minutes. When I couldn’t help but to cry with him he got annoyed. He didn’t want me to cry too. Although he still couldn’t articulate why he was crying, he was more light hearted the rest of the evening. As for me, I think I felt more heavy and more unable to help him with the unmet longings in his heart for a daddy. Most moms already deal with a thing called “mom guilt.” You know, the feeling where you are never enough, like you never quite do enough for your kids. So there’s that and now there’s grief, a perpetual hole in his life that I cannot fill up. A perpetual hole in my own life and that of my daughters because daddy is not getting better.

It’s the moments of reverie, of enjoying my children playing in the yard and the sound of their laughter that help save me from the seemingly bottomless pit of despair that wants to sit in the center of my life. I walk around it alright most days, avoiding its slippery slope, but every so often my foot will dip in and I lose myself and go rolling round and round and down like a coin in one of those donation funnels stores have so kids will ask their parents for money to give. My brain wants to turn to imaginings of the worst possible outcome for my life filled with more and more disappointment until I completely lose myself in the depths of despair turning to old addictions for comfort for lack of the comforts I most want.

I question God, how long oh Lord, how long? Surely there will be a redemptive plot twist if I continue to follow you. I remember the stories of Abraham, Joseph, and many others, of all the things that appeared foolish during their lives, as if God had completely abandoned them and was never going to fulfill the prophecies for their lives. I am aware of the long wait they each endured.

There is no way out of the pit of despair but to realign myself with you and what you have told me personally and what I see you have done in the lives of others who remained faithful. There comes your still small voice reminding me that I do not need to fear and that what is meant for me will not miss me. You do not mean me harm and that even as I travel round the coin funnel you do not condemn me but go with me and bring me back out, planting my feet back on solid ground, reminding me that I have a purpose and that I am loved and provided for. You remind me that you suffer with me and that suffering is not something you delight in. You do delight in me. You do delight in my relationships with my children. You see me in my suffering and even though I sometimes fall, you do not love me any less. You understand and you are bigger than my weaknesses and I trust that you will use even these ashes to create something beautiful. Let me be found here, faithful, and not grumbling in my wilderness.

So even after another fall into some depth of grief, I rise again, watching and waiting to see what my God will do. I will continue looking for you for you are here with me, closer than breath. I will keep sniffing the air for the aroma of Home as you guide me on my way even through the depths of the sadness in my life.