Right Where I'm Meant to Be...Waiting

"Most Sacred Heart of Jesus I Trust In You"

Those are the words that have stained my chalkboard.  I spent a considerable amount of time drawing them up there more than 5 months ago, outlining with different colors, accentuating certain words. I usually quickly toss a bible verse or quote up there and it stays for a few days or a week until something else comes across that I want to replace it with. But this phrase I just couldn’t erase.  Maybe it’s because I felt erasing it would mean I didn’t trust God. Maybe it’s because I thought M would come home before I had to erase it. Most likely it’s because I still need the reminder. Some days I believe it and it makes me happy to see it. Other days I doubt and I need to remember that I believed it on the day I wrote it.

Of course I trust God, my whole life has been scene after scene of Him showing me He is trustworthy, and especially when things look bleak. When it’s the darkest has often been when He has chosen to create light. But it’s so easy to get caught in the “waiting place” as Dr. Seuss calls it. When something bad happens and we wait for it to get better. We wait to feel better again. We wait for a new friend or boyfriend to come along. We wait for a new job or a new opportunity. We wait for our pain to heal. And sometimes we get impatient in the waiting. It takes longer than we think it should. And that’s when we start to lose hope. We start to think maybe He isn’t coming. Maybe He won’t calm this storm. Maybe this is too trivial for Him to concern Himself with. Maybe He doesn’t care.

It’s been more than 5 months since I read M a bed time story. It’s been more than 5 months since she ran and giggled through the house. It’s been more than 5 months since she said she was thankful for “mommy” at meal prayer or played hide and seek with Dan. I stared at those words on the chalk board today realizing I never expected to need them for 5 months. I thought it would be better by now. I thought you would heal this situation or heal my pain. But here I am, 5 months later, still figuring out how to navigate each day with one child absent, still waiting for you to step in.

She visited us this weekend. It was such a blessing and incredible joy to hold her and see her smile and giggle and play with her brothers and sister. And yet, it’s so heartbreaking to watch them and know we are saying goodbye in a few hours, to see the hurt in her eyes when I know she’s wondering where I’ve been. How do you grieve someone who is running around laughing in your living room? How does this become the new normal where my daughter lives with someone else? How do I laugh and play with her while my heart is breaking? How do I pull her onto my lap and read books through a cracking voice and fighting back tears?

Life is messy. It doesn’t stay neatly in the lines we’d like to draw where joy begins and sorrow ends. We have this desire for perfection that someday I believe we will experience in heaven. But I’m more and more convinced that learning how to live in the “mess” is what we must do here on earth.

The Sacred Heart of Jesus teaches us that it isn’t a simple waiting time of pain that will be erased as soon as the situation changes or I am given the grace to heal. But that right here in this place is where God needs me to learn how to be. That the Heart of Jesus always feels, at the same moment, an incredible love for us and an incredible sorrow for the pain of losing those He loves and the pain we inflict on each other in the world. The joy of love and the pain caused by sin. The heart of Jesus feels these on such an amazing level. ALL THE TIME. Maybe then, He is calling me to enter into His heart itself. To understand a tiny fraction of the way he loves and hurts all at the same time. To realize that it doesn’t come and go, it’s not something we can wait for it to pass, but that we must learn to live and thrive during.

I caught a short segment of a PBS special the other day where an author was talking about how differently they used to treat the season of Winter. Everything they did on the farm was because of winter. They labored all summer, spring and fall to make sure they had what they needed to survive winter. It forced them to always focus on winter, because if they didn’t, they wouldn’t survive. Because of the way our lives have changed, we have lost this “respect” or focus on winter. Our lives aren’t ordered to it, it’s simply something we endure or get through for a few months.

What if we are missing something? What if the very season that we hope to just quickly pass through, is in fact the most important one we are meant to live? What if the mess, the suffering, the heartbreak, the most unthinkable pain and loss are really the main events that God is using to change our hearts?  

And if so, if suffering is my focus, then I must re-order my life to prepare for it. Because it’s probably not what will physically happen to me in suffering that will be the end of me, but instead whether or not my soul is conditioned for the elements.

“Most Sacred Heart of Jesus I trust in You”. I wrote those words on the chalkboard 5 months ago. A few weeks ago I decided it was time to erase them to put up a new phrase. I washed the board with a wet cloth and left the room while I waited for it to dry. When I returned, the words were still there. They had been up there so long they had penetrated the board and couldn’t be easily erased.

 

We must learn, and grow and develop our faith, as desperately as those storing food for winter. We must etch into our souls our trust and love and faith in Jesus so when life gets difficult our hearts are ready, and we can not only survive but really LIVE in the mess, where nothing can erase our trust in God.