Funerals

Old blog, good stuff.

Journal entry: April 5, 2007

I woke up this morning with the sense of a gaping emptiness inside of me. Laying in the darkness, alone in a house full of children, and a bed complete with husband and newborn child I felt loneliness engulfing me. This is not a new experience for me, yet nonetheless I went through the motions like always of trying to explain it away. Should I lay there and cry, mourning the lost opportunities of my life? Call on the telephone my estranged father in California who was never there for me as a child? Seek counseling? Once again I can rationalize each of these instances and why they didn't work before and why they won't work now. I'm a Christian and have been all my life, so why do I feel incomplete? Why and when did this all begin?

Finally realizing that I am losing my battle with insomnia, I get up to take a shower. As the hot water hits my skin I go back in my mind trying to find the beginning of this feeling. From the time I was a little girl I have always dreaded getting up in the morning. For me there was no freshness in the new day, only monotony. I lived for the expectancy of an excitement that might come one day. But was it always this way? Then the image focuses in my mind and my emotions crumble. Could that be it? Might I actually have a reason and a beginning for this achiness inside?

I remember my second grade year waking up in the early hours many mornings to the sounds of busyness outside my window. Looking out to investigate I would see the employees of the mortuary behind my house unloading the hearsts. I will never forget the creepiness and the awful feeling the thought of a dead body puts into the mind of a child. When something is dead the very best you can do with it is dig a hole, cover it up with dirt, put a sign on it so anyone passing by knows that it's there, when it lived and died and its name. Ultimately after all the ceremony you have to walk away. As a child I knew very little of death except that I didn't want it to happen to anyone I knew. It was an ending to something I loved and I would never have it back ever. Now as an adult and having witnessed countless funerals I understand more. The bottom line is you have to walk away and go on. It does not matter that the thing that you're walking away from has somehow grasped a little piece of you down there in that black hole you just covered up.

Looking back, that was the year that my parents split up. For me it was the first death I ever really knew, but naming it and putting a headstone up hasn't been so easy. It wasn't just my parents marriage, it was a certain life I would never know of, a complete family, a relationship with the most important man in a girls life that I would never have. So much was entailed in that funeral I don't know if I have even been able to bury it all. Maybe some parts are still out in the open rotting away.

Conclusion May 24, 2008

Looking at this old journal entry I am so glad I didn't finish it. As I remember, at the time I couldn't, there was no resolution that day. God had begun a revealing of the deadness in my life, a work that still continues. When I tell people what has conspired in my walk with the Lord the past two years, I am amazed myself. In 2007, God taught me that He is not a strict dictator. There is no figuring Him out. He is way too complex and sometimes contradictory. He uses prostitutes, foreigners, Gentiles, shepherd boys and all the most unlikely vessels.

This year I am learning of His great love for me. He cares so much He doesn't want anything to hinder our relationship. He has filled me up so many times with His goodness, but this time He says there is to be nothing else in my cup taking up space that He wants to fill. Emptiness before God is an intense aching. Its like a woman who so desires to be pregnant that its all she can think of. I want to feel His life growing inside of me.

Allow Him to stand at the tomb of your heart and call out all the deadness. He will bring those dead things back to life so you can go forth and proclaim God's goodness. You know when Jesus went to call Lazarus back from the dead He was warned that the body had begun to stink or rot away, but when Jesus brought Lazarus back he was whole. Restoration is a glorious thing.