The strangest thing has happened: life has gone on.
Despite my mother’s death, our world has kept turning.
Pictures have been painted. Poems have been written.
Books have been read. Songs have been sung.
Music has been played. Friends and family have visited.
Tea has been served. Cookies have been baked.
Errands have been run. Classes have been taught.
The new normal is here. And it is, in fact, the old normal. Nothing seismic has shifted in our lives, even though it feels like a bit of the earth gave way underneath my feet. How can that be? I ask myself. And, in the same moment, Of course, the living go on living.
I have been blessed with a husband, a house full of children, a farm full of animals. And while I will not even begin to suggest that I have this whole mourning thing figured out, or that I have finished grieving, I will say that one of the gifts of responsibility is that it makes it impossible to throw your hands in the air and give yourself over to the kind of introspection that might actually be more destructive than constructive.
God is wise like that; He sets the lonely in families… because it’s through our families that the iron of our character is sharpened, our three-strand cord is forged, and the reminder of Christ’s abundant comfort is whispered to us most effectively.
All of this was true before my mother’s passing, and all of it is true now. I take great joy right now in this new evidence of the fact that Jesus truly is the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow.