Getting With It

A friend wrote today to remind me I hadn't posted since the 19th, and I needed to "get with it" because she "needs something to read". You have to know this friend meant this good-naturedly and humorously. I told her I didn't want to keep posting about grief, and she said "write whatever is on your mind".

Well, I've been around. If you check your stats, you'll see hits from Portland, which means I've been reading, but you'll also notice I haven't been leaving many comments. My brain is on short-circuit right now; pulling together a cohesive comment is a struggle. But your posts have encouraged me, if only to let me know you have or have had struggles but have gotten through them and life went on. You have posted beautiful, intelligent and/or comedic posts, and I thank you for the distraction from my somewhat dimly lit heart and soul.

Monday was a particularly bad day, but my friend Pam came over and listened to me blather into the wee hours of the night, and when I woke Tuesday morning I did feel better. Not to say anything went away, but I felt loved because of her visit and that meant a great deal.

Thing is, I haven't had anything to say, and yet I've had everything to say. I've wanted to give silent shouts many times this week. Last week, as most of you know, some people we know lost a son in a karting accident. KJ was 12 years old, with a future so bright he had to wear shades. No joke. I didn't really learn this until we attended his memorial service last Friday...where time after time people spoke of his unrealized dream, and the real life steps he was taking to get there. One of our sons also races karts, so there have been several levels of processing for us in all this.

This grief was added to some already significantly unsettled issues in our lives, and while the loss certainly overshadows everything else, I can't minimize the other challenges we face. I'm not able to go into details at this point; I wish I was. But the summation of the parts has been a bit overwhelming.

I imagine there is almost nothing like the death of a young person to make us take a hard look at life. I feel as though my eyes have been opened. I don't understand this death, I won't pretend to understand, I won't offer platitudes. The best thing I have is "I don't know." But in honor of a life taken too soon, I am determined to learn something from this. So here goes.

Jesus says to come as little children.

I think in the idea that we are to come as children, we have to think about all the qualities children possess that adults often don't. One is fearlessness. Fear is a learned behavior; children have less of it than adults. We know this. We KNOW this. This is why my dad always said we should learn to swim and ski as children, because it would be so much harder to learn as adults.

Children have huge dreams and little understanding of or need for things which might stand in their way. As children, we all envisioned ourselves to be astronauts or rock stars when we grew up; we had no reservations about our aspirations. We could do anything and we were invincible.

At 12 years old, this young man who died was fairly confident of what his future held. If you had asked him, he likely would have told you, and he was well on his way to accomplishing his dream. Thing is, and something for us to learn as adults, he wasn't afraid to dream big. He wasn't concerned with the things which might hold him back, he just went for it, heart and soul and breath, and he loved every minute of it.

Children aren't afraid to have a huge dream...and this day I'm grieving all the times I let fear prevent me from dreaming.

Something I'm really thinking deeply about, and you can pray for this if you'd like, is community. We (my husband and I) have a vision. I don't know where to go with it...then again, I know exactly where to go and I simply have fear hurdles to get past.

So here I am, dreaming more than ever before, and looking for that thing inside me that is dying to get out. I don't want to let practicalities get in the way, because with Jesus all things are possible. I want to be like a little child and dream big - not big in size or importance, just big to me, in my little reality. Huge, in fact.