Thursday, October 11, 2012

Today we laugh...






Today we are celebrating Isaak's 11th birthday. And celebrating we are! Over the past year God has brought our family from a place of pain and mourning and chaos to a place of peace and joy and, to be honest, still chaos.  Yesterday we wept.  But today we laugh.

The changes that our family have undergone are due in large part to the transformation that has happened in Isaak's life. He has worked so hard the last 10 months through 3 day a week therapy sessions and radical diet changes and counseling. We could not be more proud of him and more thankful for the way that God has redeemed the pain that we felt for so long.

I was looking through some pictures this morning and reading some things that I had written in the darkest of days. It brings me so much joy to know that I am on the other side of that and yet, at the same time, I feel so much for that girl that I was. At the time I don't think I even realized how bad it was. How broken I was. I remember so many tears and so many prayers begging God to make sense of all of it. There were days when I felt like He had turned away. When I felt like I was alone and abandoned and destined to live in that darkness forever. I found this that I wrote around the time of Isaak's birthday one year ago.
Time. 
Time disappears.
Days. Weeks. Months. Years.
All gone.
They evaporate.
Vanish. 
Because time is a luxury for the hearts that are still beating.
It's a measure of breaths and smiles and dawns.
Hours clump together to form days and days are marked by the creation of something new.   
But when your heart surrenders to the old, new ceases to exist.
When you've given up.
Given in.
Even time succumbs to the dark. 
It's not that light can't be seen from the dark.
Oh, it's there.
It's glaring and blinding and a constant reminder of what could have been.
Of a joy reserved for others.
For better.
For more deserving.
For what feels like everyone else.
But you.
And what is left.   
Time.

Reading that today makes me sad for all the time that is gone.  It breaks my heart that I refused to see that even in pain there can be joy. It makes me realize that when I felt the most alone, I really wasn't. It also makes me wonder how I got anything done except painting my nails black and listening to Emo music.  Seriously.

Just last Sunday I sat (and wept) through a worship service as these words rang in my head and heart in a way that makes them so much more than words.  More than letters and spaces and consonants and vowels.  More than a hope or a wish.  But a promise that I have tested and I know with all that I am to be true.  From Luke 6:21:

 
Blessed are you who hunger now,
    for you will be satisfied.
Blessed are you who weep now,
    for you will laugh.
  

Yesterday we wept.  Today we are laughing. And still weeping, but tears of joy.






No comments: