Today I Wept

It's been so long since I've blogged that when I sat down and actually thought about it this morning I realized it was because I've been living again, enjoying my summer and seeing friends and loved ones more frequently. It's been a nice feeling and one that I've learned to enjoy and accept for what it is with little guilt or regret. I've been to visit Calvin more often in the past few months than ever before and the quiet time I share with my son at his grave has become important in my healing. I miss him alot. And while I think of Calvin everyday, often several times over the course of my day, it's not often that I speak of him anymore. Not in any depth anyways until today. As I was chatting with a friend on the phone today, the subject of God was raised, my friend professing to not believe. Having struggled with my own personal beliefs in God since losing Calvin, I posed the question "So where do you think we go when we die?"

Asking this question brought me back to my own desperate wish to believe in God and His Kingdom following Calvin's death. As I walked backwards down the road of my childhood and the values I was raised with I realized that as a child I had never questioned God's existence, it was something I accepted as part of my life. It wasn't until I started losing people I loved that I began to question first God's goodness, second His existence. As I started to explain to my friend that as a mother who has lost her child, my desperate wish to believe in Heaven simply so that I may one day see my beautiful boy again, the tears began to fall. The next thing I knew, I was sobbing. Because I do want to believe. Because I do miss Calvin more than I realize at times and that there are so few people that I truly speak indepth with about him. Because it had been so long since the last time I cried that the floodgates were opened and all the hurt and doubt and fear came pouring out into that sympathetic ear. After explaining my want to believe and the struggle I've had with my faith, I asked another question...."Where do you go when you truly need comfort?" My answer to that question was to God. To church. To a place where I can lay my deepest sorrows in the Hands of the Creator and trust that in time things will work themselves out. I recalled days of being overcome with sorrow where I would find myself in a pew at the church praying, asking God to please, please just make things better for me and I realized that while God has never made any direct promises to me, that in whatever situation I had found myself in seeking God's guidance, that things eventually always got better. Things HAVE been better in my life, better than they have been in almost two years yet the pain is still there just under the surface waiting to be reawakened again. Surprising but not. Given a mother's love for her child and it's infinite boundaries, I expect the pain to be as just as limitless. Perhaps all I needed to feel that rush of pain, that rush of sweet sorrow and longing for my son was to open my heart back up to believing. Perhaps the comfort I seek in God is disguised in pain, having to feel it, eat it, sleep it, breathe it before healing can begin. Perhaps this is yet another message reconnecting me to the sorrow, reaffirming my need for spiritual direction and guidance. Maybe this was God's Hand gently guiding me back....today I wept for my son and oddly it felt good.