On Falling Leaves and Pressing On

I spent the day off the beaten trail with my little adventurers. It was spontaneous, unplanned, and absolutely what I needed.
Fall has always been my favorite season.  But this year has been different.  I will never cease to be amazed at the way things in the natural world around us are wired and created to give visual clues and methodology and language to the reality of our experience. In the last few weeks, as life has begun to settle down and routines have begun to form, I find I’m confronted with the grief that has lingered these last few months since the whirlwind of our spring: primarily the death of my sister and our moving away (albeit not far) from the community we’d established for most of our marriage back here to my hometown.

Seeing fall, experiencing the slow decent, the unabashed beauty that preceeds what will inevitably be cold and harsh and devoid of visible growth, has served as a little whisper in my ear, reminding me to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to keep hope alive. In the change of seasons, the death of dreams, even the most searing losses, there is always hope. Winter always follows fall, but spring always follows winter. Summer lingers beyond that. And fall will come again.I once heard a man who had traveled a little farther down life’s journey say that if he could do one thing differently in his youth, he would have pushed into the pain and the trials and grief, rather than expend all his energy working to avoid it.  With the help of some amazing listeners, and the rich, deep grace that seeps in to my life again and again, even when I least expect it, and when, for sure, I am undeserving, I am pressing in.

I am holding out hope that Jesus, who came to bind up the brokenhearted, to give freedom and bring light to the darkest corners of our world and of my heart, to comfort and provide for those who grieve, will shape me into an oak of righteousness (Isaiah 61),  that His life will be more evident in me because of these losses.  That the fear and mistrust and control that the loss exposes in me would be changed by His love, and made into something beautiful. I am hoping.

Yesterday

All my life I’ve heard people use the expression “it seems like only yesterday” and assumed it was a nostalgic notion, a sweet little hyperbole.  But tonight the Rubbermaid bins emerged from the basement, the telltale sign of the changing of seasons for mothers of multiple same gender children.

Sorting and sifting through Laura’s old clothes to replenish little Ellie’s wardrobe for fall, I realized it’s not sweet at all.  It’s a jarring epiphany that time is going so fast that one may actually be loosing her mind.

As I checked tags and made piles, I felt as if I had entered some kind of alter reality. I know in my head that it has been two and a half years since I pulled out that soft white sweater with the embroidered rose on the shoulder that Laura wore almost every time it was clean. (I know because I did the math several times to make sure.) But I cannot fathom that it has actually been years since then. Years! It literally feels like it was yesterday.  I now know that this overused little expression is less a sweet sentiment, more a confession of lunacy.

So as time flies by today, at a rate I cannot comprehend, I am taking pictures (of the kids too, not just the piles of clothes!), treasuring moments in my heart, and embracing a posture of gratitude, even for piles of laundry that will cloth healthy kids and keep them warm as seasons change and little people grow.