You know what I've discovered? I compose my best blog posts in the bathroom. Showering, applying make-up, drying my hair, brushing my teeth...something about being in that room I guess. The problem is, the bathroom holds all of my awesome posts hostage. I walk out of that room and *poof* - gone. I'm thinking about hooking up a laptop in there but I'm not quite sure how to keep the steam/humidity from ruining the thing inside of three days. My husband likes his showers VERY hot.
Which is to say, I have plenty of thoughts - kind, gentle and intelligent thoughts (anyone who knows me just choked on their coffee hard enough to blow it out their nose...) on all sorts of issues from gun control to the President's inaugural activities held off until Martin Luther King, Jr. Day to what my kids at for breakfast but not one of those brilliant posts will ever get published.
They're all still in the bathroom.
Instead, I'm going to chat just a tiny bit again about Mom. By now I REALLY thought that painful ache of missing her, that physical pain - the one that makes me want to scream at the top of my lungs because I'm certain the power of it is going to make me explode - would have subsided just a bit by now.
Why am I so ridiculously wrong about this one thing? I have yet to accept that I am ALWAYS going to feel that pain when I think about missing my mother. I've described it before but it is really like someone took my right arm and just ripped it off. What's left is all jagged and exposed and raw and just...excruciatingly painful.
I'm fairly sure I've also talked about feeling and knowing that grief is not about losing Mom, it's about missing Mom. It's about me. Mom is celebrating God and His glory every. single. day. She isn't missing earth, or us, or our squabbling or driving to work or even holding her grandbaby. She is celebrating God. What I grieve is that I don't get to talk to her. I don't get to go shopping with her. I don't get to bounce ideas off of her. She was my creative filler-outter. If I had an idea, I could bring it up to her and she'd start with "Oh yeah... great idea. And then you could..." and off we'd go. I keep saying that I need to figure out where my motivation went & get it back. Only one way I can do that and so far? No one has snuck into heaven and returned to earth with someone God has called home... at least not that I've heard about and I'm fairly sure someone would have published a book. Or a blog.
So..to get back semi-on-track. When I was thinking about Mom the other day I wandered back to a conversation she and I had about the fears she had. She was oh so afraid of the dying part. So that day I told her what I believe happens. I told her that I believe the last time someone closes their eyes here on earth is the moment Jesus shows up. And I believe He walks that someone home. Or, we just...go to sleep until He returns if that is how God is working it.
For years now I've held onto that hope, never having any kind of proof just basing that on what I know of who God is. The just going to sleep part, though, doesn't strike me as right somehow. There is nothing concrete there, it is all feeling (which, as the Bible says, we aren't supposed to trust our heart so I don't rule it out as a no way, no day idea) but it really feels wrong that a God so loving, so merciful, who put us here with the only purpose of glorifying Him would leave us sleeping for, for some, millenia.
Then I read this verse the other day:
Precious in the sight of the LORD is the death of His faithful servants (Psalm 116:15)
And it stops me in my tracks. Precious? Death is precious to God? I started digging a little deeper because I thought it HAS to be referring to that age old Christian phrase "dying to self." And all I read, every commentary, every study, everything I grabbed said the same thing - physical death is precious to God. He knows we weren't built for it. We weren't meant for it. It terrorizes us, scares us and for oh so many of us is painful, some quick, some drawn out but still painful...and He considers it precious. Like a delicate bird to be handled oh so gently. I think of the verses that talk about God dancing over us, rejoicing when one "sheep" is found, singing over us...and I wonder...how must it be to pause at the death of each faithful servant and consider it precious.
And I knew Mom was safe. I just knew it. I've known it since before she died but I keep getting reminders over and over and over again that what I know is true. I'm not making it up, it's not out of some desire to sugar coat what she went through. She's safe. And I get to be with her again. We are going to hold hands (or whatever God allows us to do) and praise God together. Together. Again.
So, the post was a little less random than I expected but just so I can say I didn't monopolize the WHOLE thing talking about Mom again, here's a picture of my two boys on Monday. The elder C took the younger C up into the mountains for some snowboarding. What cracks me up about this picture is the sun. If you were here on Monday you would know the entire Seattle area was socked in, grayer than gray, in a freezing fog. The mountains, on the other hand, had brilliant snow and temperatures in the 40's, 50's & in some places? 60's. Ridiculous...
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