I have been struggling with much grief and fear this holiday season. My beloved family is fractured, some of my children estranged, it seems, beyond restoration. Being a mother has been the bliss of my life. Without them, meaning, pleasure, any sense of satisfaction, has paled, despite the outstanding nourishment of my many friends, my remarkable daughter, who is endlessly supportive and helpful, and my delightful grandchildren. They are all wonderful and I am truly, truly grateful for their love and infinite encouragement. But we always want what we don’t have, don’t we? One of our great human flaws is a recurrent inability to be satisfied by the good that we do have right under our noses. We long for what we miss. And I miss my children with a gnawing pain that literally howls through my every waking moment. I try to move on, I try to be accepting, but their absence is a bottomless pit of loss and pain.
Then there is the fact of the unknown. With the spread of the cancer, it is
literally a waiting game. Waiting for
the other shoe to drop. Waiting for the inevitable
day when my oncologist calls and the result of my biannual scan is no longer
good news. Fearing that the facts would
be simply too hard to face, I have never asked or researched what exactly my
prognosis is. Last month I finally
screwed up the courage and looked it up.
Breast cancer which has spread to the liver has a projection of three to
five years from diagnosis. I know it could
be worse. But I am greedy, another very
human flaw. I want so much more
time. I am already a year down. I am sad and I am scared.
My faith has been shaken.
Yet another flaw. I am the first
one to admit, I am all too human and all too flawed. But it has been awfully hard to remain
reassured by the spiritual when the corporal is so spectacularly challenging. Loss upon loss upon loss has worn me down. The basest, most immature part of me cries
out, haven’t I had enough already?!? I
know intellectually that life is just like that. It doesn’t matter if you have tried to be a
good person, tried to do the right things.
Good intentions + going to church + doing the best you can = health,
happiness and success, right? But there is
no formula, no equation. Stuff just
happens.
I have never believed God causes bad things to happen to us,
I do not believe He visits disasters upon us.
I could not believe in a vindictive, punishing deity. But lately I have found it is difficult to
believe in any deity at all.
I have received many Christmas cards this year from the delightful
people I am surrounded by. One card was
from someone who is particularly special to me.
The day it arrived was an especially busy one. Before I could open it, I was interrupted and
set it aside. Four days later, when I
went to open it and reply, it was nowhere to be found. I felt sick.
I turned every room upside down. Because
my mobility is so limited, there are not too many places I could have lost it
in. I went through every box and basket,
every surface. Nothing. I chastised myself over and over for being so
careless, so disorganized, so stupid, so thoughtless, on and on. I automatically invoked Saint Anthony, every Catholic’s
resource for lost things. But I didn’t
really believe a word of it.
After another fruitless round of searching I collapsed in my
recliner, utterly exhausted and discouraged.
I’ll just rest for five minutes, I thought, and then I will look
again. It must be stuck in something
else. I’ll turn out every catalog, every
book I have laid my hands on in the past year, every container. As I leaned my head back in the chair I
noticed a small white envelope lying face down on the corner of my chairside
table. This is a tiny table, with barely
enough room for my laptop. I had
searched for card on the table easily ten times. I had picked the laptop up each time. There had been no card. It wasn’t there. But it was now. Perched on the edge, bright white, unmissable.
I burst into tears. I
don’t ask for signs, I never have, even when my faith was at its strongest, I
never felt comfortable testing God, demanding things. It felt disrespectful and disloyal. But I believed at that moment, with the
inexplicable appearance of a card I had been searching for over hours, God had
sent me a sign. He had sent me a message:
do not fear, I am with you.
After I had children, I struggled deeply with the concept of
putting God before else, as demanded in the Bible. How could I put anything before my beloved children? How could I?
It was impossible, nothing meant more to me than my children, not even
God. I always felt guilty about that and
even slightly fearful. How much of a sin
was it? Was I dooming myself to eternal
damnation because I was putting mortal beings before the Lord? I decided it didn’t matter. I loved my children more than life itself and
if God didn’t understand that, oh well.
But here I was, facing Christmas Eve alone, the night we
traditionally had come together as a family and celebrated the holiday. The night I cherished as a representation of everything
I loved most in the world, the night I had the opportunity, shallow though it
was, to tangibly demonstrate my love for them by giving them things I thought
would make them happy. The sadness of
being by myself, of knowing that they were deliberately choosing to exclude me
from their lives when I needed them the most, was overwhelming. I had laughed in God’s face and told Him He
meant less to me than these people who were wounding me so deeply. And He was saying, I am here anyway.
Some may scoff at what appears to be my fanciful
superstition. Some may say say that the
card had been there all along and I just missed it. Some may argue there is a perfectly logic
explanation for missing that glaring white envelope all those hours. And I might agree with all of them on some
level. But I am making a choice. I am choosing to not be miserable. I am choosing to be reminded that I am not alone. I am choosing to not be afraid. I am gratefully, humbly choosing to accept the
gift of God’s love and comfort.
Isaiah 41:10
10 So do not fear, for I am with you; do not be dismayed,
for I am your God. I will strengthen you and help you; I will uphold you with
my righteous right hand.
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