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So we’re not giving up. How could we! Even though on the outside it often looks like things are falling apart on us, on the inside, where God is making new life, not a day goes by without His unfolding grace. These hard times are small potatoes compared to the coming good times, the lavish celebration prepared for us. There’s far more here than meets the eye.

2 Corinthians 4:16-18 (MSG)

 

In the very early morning hours of September 12, 2016, my mother left us for heaven. It had been a long good-bye. Like watching a train in slow motion pulling out of a station until finally, it disappears out of sight, she slipped into eternity.

 

For the last year of her life, I watched Mom’s vibrant energy gradually fade away. She became confined to her bed until all that remained was her quiet, shallow breathing and then, finally, silence. Standing by her bed with my Dad and two older sisters that morning, we struggled to accept reality. She was gone.

 

Death is not pretty. We all had gathered the night before to say our final good-byes. Hospice nurses, bless them all, tried to be helpful, considerate. I watched them gently lift her covered, tiny, lifeless frame onto a gurney. Wheeled down the hallway, out the front door, into the grey dawn. And I thought, there is nothing good about having to say good bye.

 

That final year of her life, I so wanted to hear her voice as I remembered it growing up. I wanted her to get well. To come engage again in my world, to scoop me up, and envelope me in her arms and kiss me like she couldn’t get enough of me. Sometimes a loved one leaves us suddenly, like a tsunami without any warning sirens. And sometimes a loved one fades slowly away like old photographs.

 

I see her face in beautiful snapshots captured over her 90 years. Here she is as a three-year old child, looking like a cherub beside her older sister. There, she is a young teenage girl with the dewy freshness of youth, looking straight at me through her wire framed glasses, giggling in a flowered summer dress. In another, she leans on a girlfriend under a shady trellis of bougainvillea. Her light cotton shirt, short sailor shorts, and espadrilles are perfectly in style.  And in this one, she’s standing beside her mother in front of an old Coptic Church. Why did she never tell me that her travels around the world included a trip to Egypt? I think now how I really should have asked her more questions about her life.

 

Mom, I miss you. I miss the things you’d say.

Say once more, that when they made Daddy, they broke the mold.

Ask me again, how are adorable Stella and Rylie doing?

Tell me again how, on the day Christopher came into this world, you saw Greg’s deep love for me.

Remind me again, when I am stressed, not to worry, to pray, and that you are sure everything will turn out all right.

 

What I want is what I can’t have, right now. I want my Mom back. I want my son, Christopher back. And for reasons I can’t understand, heaven determined to hold these whom I love so dearly, out of sight, out of touch. But I know that Jesus is touched with the “feeling of our infirmities” (Hebrews 4:15).

 

Jesus told a triptych of parables in Luke 15 about a lost sheep, a lost coin, and a lost son.  With each story, the impact of loss increases: a valuable sheep, a priceless coin, an irreplaceable son. In each story, there is a period of searching and missing and waiting. God knows all about these feelings.  This is the emotional landscape that, at times, fills my dreams.

 

I read through these parables to each of the happy endings.

The sheep is found. “Rejoice with me!”

The coin is recovered. “Rejoice with me!” 

The prodigal son returns. “Feast and celebrate, and rejoice with me!”

 

I know God’s promises well. I feed on them. I know that one day, this longing and sadness will be replaced by true joy. The lost will be found, the missing returned, the treasure restored.

 

So I meditate on these parables and find something hidden here that I had missed. There is far more than meets the eye. It’s the connection between suffering, waiting and the increasing measure of joy.

 

The woman suffered the loss of her coin only to experience greater joy when she recovered it. The shepherd lost his sheep only to rejoice when he found it again. And the father who lost his son? When he returned, the father threw a party and rejoiced over his son even more than if he had been home all along.

 

You may have experienced this too. When something we value is misplaced or lost, its value increases. We miss it even more! The joy we experience in recovering what we lost is greater than if it had been in our possession all along. Sorrow and longing will only increase the joy . . . soon . . . when all is restored! I know so. I really do.