One week ago today we were at the beach at Bear Lake. Abe was helping Mike get the waverunner launched and building a giant sand whale (as Hans simultaneously un-built it).
Just this past Sunday Abe stood in the circle as Mike gave Starling her baby blessing. He sat around the kitchen table with us eating corn-on-the-cob and potatoes and gravy. He laughed with my brothers in my mom's living room as they told mission stories.
This very week he was here. Throwing pop-its with the kids, having an airsoft war with friends, and a marshmallow-gun war with his younger brothers. Three days ago he was taking his mountain bike out of the garage for an evening ride. Two mornings ago he was eating cereal with the kids and laughing over the antics of Goldie's new cat (like he wasn't leaving us for two years in just a few short hours)
I don't know how any of that can be . . . when Abe has been gone for a thousand years now.
Truly he only left Wednesday. Just two measly days ago. But the bigness of his departure, the impact on our souls, . . . and the awful awareness of its length (and of how different everything will be when it ends) makes it seem he's already been gone from us for an eternity.
I keep thinking of Hannah in the bible who promised that if the Lord would give her a son, she would give him to the Lord. How hard it must it must have been, and what tremendous faith and devotion she must have had, to receive the gift and then -- keep her word and turn it back to God.
In my own little way I have promised God my children. I've promised to raise them up learning all that I know to teach them of Him. I've even worked hard to instill in them a desire to give their lives to bringing that light to others. And Abe serving a mission? It's what I have always wanted. I've prayed and fasted for it. I'm so grateful he is worthy. And so proud that he is willing and wants to leave everything even remotely familiar to him to try to bring truth and help to others and to have an enormous growing and maturing experience.
But the temporary pain of it all (the not having my family all together, not being able to comfort or help Abe if he's lonely or scared or sick, the end of having him here in everything routine and normal) is much more acute than I'd realized it would be . . . back when it was only a goal and a plan . . . and not an abrupt and wrenching reality!
We are trusting right now in this promise for our oldest son:
"For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it."
But I hadn't realized how much I would be living that scripture by letting him go. And for my personal circumstances, it seems a bit ironic that accepting each of these children into my life and home has seemed such an enormous sacrifice . . . only to have the sacrifice reverse itself when I have to give them back over to God.
Still, despite every overwhelming, big feeling right now (tears and worries and feeling like I've been punched in the gut several times a day with some new realization of him not here or worry over how he's feeling there) -- and despite a thousand small, insignificant things that feel big (who will be excited about Ritz crackers in the cupboard? who will rush to read the Reader's Digest before anyone else can? who will help Mike lift the heavy things? who will stay up late fully appreciating action-packed movies with Mike? who will have Nerf gun battles with Jesse? who will walk Daisy through AP class decisions?), I am trusting in the message from Jeffrey Holland in his talk, "Remember Lot's Wife".
One of the hardest things for me in all of this has been this feeling that everything we knew in life just ended. When Abe does come back to us, it won't be as it was now. He will have lived away from us in a foreign country for two years! I don't even know what our family and relationship dynamics will be exactly when he returns. So this? What we've been living with him? It just experienced an end. But Holland's message focused on this very type of thing. Lot's wife's error was her inability to believe that anything ahead of her could make up for or be better than what she was leaving behind. ". . . her attachment to the past," he tells us, "outweighed her confidence in the future." He then went on to say, ". . . remember that faith is always pointed toward the future. Faith always has to do with blessings and truths and events that will yet be efficacious in our lives. . . . Lot's wife . . . doubted the Lord's ability to give her something better than she already had. Apparently she thought -- fatally, as it turned out -- that nothing that lay ahead could possibly be as good as those moments she was leaving behind."
I'm in a bit of mourning right now. I cry at several points each day. I miss Abe. I am so anxious over his well-being and praying constantly for him to have perspective and comfort and peace regardless of what he is experiencing. But, I do have that kind of faith. I believe those words. I trust that there is growth and change and happiness ahead that I have yet to have even considered. And I'm grateful that I will get to know it and eager to have my eyes more fully opened to it.
1 comment:
I do love that picture of all of you crowded into that high council room. And this struck me with so much force: "it seems a bit ironic that accepting each of these children into my life and home has seemed such an enormous sacrifice . . . only to have the sacrifice reverse itself when I have to give them back over to God." Isn't that realization so strange??? How can our "instincts", or vision, or perspective, or whatever it is, be so wrong? I can hardly understand it when I think of it like that, except to think that I know MUCH MUCH MUCH less about...anything...than I think I do. (Which is kind of an unsettling feeling.)
But which also makes me hope, hope that perhaps someday that same sort of about-face realization will come regarding this trial of having them leave us?? Elder Holland's talk is the perfect one to hold onto here. Things ahead being better than things as they were...and just having to trust God's purposes. Sigh.
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