Memories… Curse or Blessing?

I had to do devotions at our weekly staff meeting and I thought I’d share about fear. Fear, just saying the word makes the hair at back of my neck stand up. There are so many fears in my life… things that has the potential to strangle and destroy me. But I must admit that my biggest fear is that I will forget Judah’s life and only remember his death.

Let me explain what I mean by this. 

I keep on having these flash-backs of the 6^th of April. The things I could have done differently or not have done that might have ensured a different outcome. I keep remembering the event... Discovering his body floating in the pool, trying to resuscitate him, the cries and sounds and smells of that specific day all plays of in my mind everyday. 

I try to remember the good days. The day he was born. The first time he said, “Dadda”. The welcoming embrace he would always give me when I came him and his smile. His beautiful smile… the smile that was ever present on his face even when he was sick or frustrated. He would always, somehow, smile.

But my fear is that the negatives and pain, the tragedy and sorrow would overcome the good memories in the battle for my heart and mind.

The preacher within me wants to give an answer to this dilemma. I feel like I should write a thesis about how to overcome this… If only I knew what to say about this. 

I might not know how to overcome this problem in my life (this idea of not knowing scares me), but this I do know, “all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose.” I know “we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

So I continue to trust that God knows best.

I just might make it… if You sing through me

Sunday evening and Monday morning was terrible. I struggled to make sense of life. I thought to myself “this is just too hard, you will never make it” I wished that I could cover my head with the blankets, sleep and never wake up. Judah was everywhere. I just could not get a  handle on my emotions. I could identify with a bereaved friend who would ,at times, speak to her deceased child and say, “please give Mommy a break today”. I felt like I just needed a break from the pain…  

But then I asked for help. I asked my friends to pray for me… and they did. How awesome is that? Thank you everybody, I am doing much better. I am finally thinking that I might just make it. I think I am finally finding some kind of rhythm again. I must admit I am not quite sure what song is playing but there seems to be a rhythm emerging.

So here is my thinking about the next few days. I am going to let life give me the rhythm (simply because I have realized that I can’t always control what happens in life) and I am going to let (beg and plead, if I have to) God sing the song of my life. I tried singing it but I always go off-tune and my lyrics don't always make sense.

So here is my prayer, “Almighty God, here’s my life. I can’t control the beat all that much but I can surrender all of my life to you. Won’t you please write a song to this beat and sing through me? Sing me to the nations… Sing me to the world… Sing your song… Sing your hope… I am but a vessel for you to sing through”.

Help me get over myself

I was reading Exodus 33... Thinking, Yoh! this Moses has got courage. I wish I had this amount of courage. Courage to demand a face-to-face with the Lord. Then I realized its not that I don't want a meeting with the Lord, it is really that I am afraid of what it might reveal about myself.

It's not that I am afraid that God might find something the matter in my life, but rather that God might say, "its OK my son, I blame you not". Somehow I feel like I need to blamed, punished even!!! That me feeling guilt or pain somehow makes it OK for Judah not to be here with us. I know its silly... nothing will ever be able to justify the LOSS that we have experienced as a family 

Help me Lord That I might get over myself and find you! Wont You do as you did with Moses and cover me with your hand so that I might see Your Glory and not just my own ego or need to be in control.

I can't sleep

I have always prayed this prayed, but never really meant it as much as I do right now. You see... I have been lying here for the last hour trying to fall off to sleep. Before this I watched tv... Tried to read my Bible (I must admit I struggle with that at the moment - maybe I shouldn't have said that, but I am trying to be real) and took a rescue tablet, but nothing. I am still lying here trying to explain to myself that... It will be OK. Eventually I will learn to live life again.

There was a moment tonight when life made sense. A fleeting moment. It was when I led the worship service at Church. In that moment I felt like I had the courage to face the pain and experience some joy.

But now I lay here wondering what happened to the strength? Where did the courage disappear to? Will I ever get through this?

Whoever you are reading this blabber of grief, please say a prayer for me... Thank you for sharing in my pain.

Sidewalk Prophets- Help Me Find It (Official Lyric Video)

Nothing left to sow

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 Lord in the land of the living" or something like that. So even when I have nothing left to sow I will trust the Lord to provide the rain that will revitalize my soul. 

I HOPE I GET THIS RIGHT!

Daddy, You didn't eat yesterday

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 with my kids. Not sure what the next step is suppose to be...

At any moment now

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 breakdowns.  I know it's unhealthy. I know it is probably not the Christian thing to do... BUT I like to pretend everything is alright. Because when everybody else thinks you're fine, sometimes you forget for a while that you're not.

I hope I get through this quickly. I feel like such a hypocrite... Like I am letting someone down by feeling this way. O my word, it is happening again.I am in the middle of another breakdown.

I hate feeling this way!

This is me trying to be real... This is me hoping that saying these things would somehow help me get through this pain. This is me me hoping that any moment now this breakdown will pass and I'll have a few moments of living. This is me pleading with my real friends, Please do not give me my way, don't let me pretend that all is OK... because it is not.

Waiting...

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 am going to make invalid these two things because I know is very important to Him.

Yet the more I wrestle… the more I struggle the more I hear God’s voice, “Wait, wait for me… wait for my power to be made manifest in your weakness.” I am reminded of the disciples before Pentecost Day. They were terrified because they could not understand… or because they thought to themselves, ‘surely if He rose from the dead, He has the power to do anything… we will take our Kingdom back’ but instead it would seem like He leaves them with only a promise to hold on to. A promise that if they wait, they will receive power.

 So here I am, waiting… I am scared because I have this certainty within me that God has called me and that Jesus is my Saviour, but I don’t have the words or the strength to preach. So I lock myself away, waiting because it’s the only thing that makes sense right now. 

Thank you God that You are with me! Thank you that you called me! Thank You that I can WAIT with You!

Singing through the storm

"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... Instead I was singing and pretending that the storm didn't exist... and that is not what it is about. Living in the light and singing through the storms calls us to be real! Real about who we are are and what we are about (at least at that moment in time) and Who God is and what God is about.

So here is the deal I struck with myself this morning, "I will will be as real as I can be for as long as I can... Singing about the light that sustained me through the darkest moments in my life". - I hope this blabber makes sense, because this is all I have today.