SUKKEL-VOORT - LIVING WITH GRIEF

I have always been a firm believer in. "What you sow, you will reap", and so I have always given my best to all circumstances even if my best wasn't so great. I always believed that the harvest will be better than the seed and that the harvest will sustain the seed. In other words, “if I continue to do my best, things will get better”. Today I feel exhausted... like I have nothing left to give. It feels like someone or something came in when I wasn't paying attention and burned down the entire crop. How will I survive this? This is the worst feeling ever...  There I go again… Feeling sorry for myself… I hate it when I do this... I guess the questions remain.What am I going to do about this?  What can I do about this? I guess the same thing I have been telling others to do in similar circumstances... Trust the Lord! The Psalmist says in Psalm 27:13, "In this I have confidence, that I will see the goodness of the Lor

This morning my son, Jeriah, forced me to sit with him at the breakfast table. He said, "Daddy, you didn't eat yesterday, that's why you were sad." These words pierced my soul. I thought I was doing a good job fooling him that I am OK. It was really tough yesterday... for no apparent reason my heart was just very down. The only way I can explain it is by saying that I felt like 'Judah's holiday' is just too long now. Somehow, I guess I convinced my heart that Judah just went to visit a friend and he'll be home any moment, but yesterday out of the blue I realized... He is not coming back. This truth is hard for me to accept. This is a truth that I can not accept... I keep re-living the 6 April over and over in my mind. I feel like I am stuck and I do not have the willingness to get myself unstuck. Why can't I just let go? Should I let go? What must I do? I just don't know... So in all my confusion and pain, today, I chose to have breakfast

Last night I watched as my daughter just broke-down for no apparent reason. In the middle of doing homework she suddenly realised that Judah was no longer with us... I know the whole "he is always present in our lives" thing, But he is not here for us to hold, to kiss, to just... whatever. That's when it hit me... this is our condition now. We live between breakdowns. All that we can hope for is that the moments between now and then would extend a little longer every day. Realising this I went on-line to search for a poster that says "breakdown in progress, approach with caution" but all I could find was, "Quiet please...Nervous breakdown in progress". This got me thinking. NO! I do not want quiet! I need a friend... someone who doesn't expect me to breakdown any moment now. Someone that can just help me forget this pain. I do not want to deal with this. I want to forget. I want to go for a walk, play pool, do anything except live between b

Waiting is tough! I absolutely am not good at waiting… yet that seems to be the only thing that I can do at the moment. Maybe I should explain what I am on about… When this tragedy struck I did everything I knew and understood so as to be able to make sense of it all, but it was all in vein. All my knowledge of scripture and ministry seem to give me nothing more than questions. I began to question my Faith and the validity of Scripture, my existence and the reasons for pain. I got angry and depressed, as if there were no other emotions in between.  But as much as I tried, two things remained…   Two things remained a certainty no matter how hard I tried to discredit it…  The Reality of Jesus and the authenticity of my Call… The more I wrestled with the “why” and “how come” questions the more I got confronted with Jesus and my Calling. It did not make sense… you see these were the very things I sought out to discredit. I wanted to hurt God just as much as I was hurting. I a

"Living in the light makes it easier to sing in the storm." (Rev Christopher Saaiman) These words have been ringing in my ears ever since I heard them. So I got up Sunday morning very intentional about singing through the storm. It was the first Mother's day without Judah, I knew it was going to be a difficult day,  but I was gonna put on a brave face and sing through the storm. But my faith let me down (or so it seemed) when I could not convince my heart that The Light didn't cause the storm. You see it was easy to convince my heart to sing when I could conveniently blame someone or something else for the storms within my life... but when my theology or understanding of God and what God does or allow doesn't match the neat boxes that I created, it all falls apart. Grief is messy... It is messing up all of what I believe to be true, true about God and true about myself. You see... I was deceiving myself thinking that I was gonna sing through the storm.

Psalm 55:6  And I say, “Oh, that I had wings like a dove!  I would fly away and be at rest; (ESV) Today I felt like running away. I felt the pain was just unbearable. How will I ever shake this pain? If only I had wings to fly away. I attended our Church Synod and part of the meeting was the celebration of the call of people in the ministry of word and sacrament. As I was listening to a young man articulate his calling into the ministry it dawned on me that I might never be able to articulate the real sense of brokenness I feel inside of me, but one thing that I know beyond a shadow of a doubt is that my God is with me. It is He who called me to touch the lives of others... even if it is only in my brokenness. Henri Nouwen writes, “The man who articulate the movements of his inner life, who can give names to his varied experiences, need no longer be a victim of himself, but is able slowly and consistently to remove the obstacles that prevent the spirit from entering. He is

Today a month ago you were taken from us. Some say, "God only takes the best." I say, "why give you to me in the first place; if only to rip you from my arms." I cannot explain the pain I feel today. My heart is torn-a-part, my soul is aching. Every part of who I am longs to see your smile, to hear you call to me... to see you enjoy the moments that life offered you. And so even thou I cannot understand why you were given only to be taken... I will learn a lesson from your short life... I will enjoy the brief moments of joy... of laughter... few as they might be. I pledge to you my boy, "Daddy will find a moment every day just to smile."

Trying to be a brave Daddy, I sucked up the pain and mustered up the courage and faced the day that was before us. I promised myself that nothing this terrible will never happen on my watch again. I will do whatever necessary to protect my kids and my wife.  It went reasonably well... I had some sense of peace knowing that I did well today. My family is safe. Until... we came to the end of the day. Running the last errant  of the day, making sure to pick up my daughters homework before she has to return to school. Our second born in the car with us suddenly says, "Mommy! You know that day when my brother went to heaven was the saddest day in my life. I did not want to let him go. I miss him so much." There was dead quiet in the car when suddenly he said (looking at his lollipop), "you know when my lollipop is crushed and it breaks, that is how my heart is broken." My question to myself is, "how do I help my precious boy  put his lollipop back together again

6 April 2015  My worst nightmare does not compare to the pain and anguish I experienced that day.  The day started pretty amazing, actually. I woke up after a fantastic weekend feeling very excited and happy about life. I have a really nice life... I am pursuing my calling and living my dream... God had blessed me with a beautiful wife and three amazing kids. "We don't have a lot of material things but we have everything that is necessary to live a happy life, my kids are happy and are learning about their faith and how to appreciate the things that really matters," I remember thinking.  How could a day that started so right... so full of hope... leave me feeling so empty and void, betrayed and utterly devastated, so utterly conflicted? How will I ever make sense of this? So I decided write this blog in an attempt to try and make sense of what's going on.  So here goes... On the 6 April my son drowned in our pool at home... Yoh! that was hard to w