Surrounded

It’s been quite a while since I’ve written a blog, so here I am doing one. The lack of published blogs on my part hasn’t been due to a lack of material. In fact I’ve got so much material that sometimes I don’t even know where to start. I’ve just gone through the absolute hardest year of my life. I feel like the fog has somewhat lifted enough where I can share with you some of my thoughts on this past season that I have endured. Since this time last year, I have personally lost 8 people who were friends or relatives of mine. Not all of the loss was due to the pandemic. In fact, most of the deaths were not related to the pandemic at all. Some were sudden and unexpected and others were due to lengthy illnesses.

The purpose of this blog is not to gain your sympathy but rather to give you a glimpse into my thoughts and how I am processing all of this in an attempt to help others who may be dealing with their own loss. This will be a series of three or four blogs and, for all I know, could turn into a book. On November 16th 2020 my wife Becky, the love of my life, went to be with Jesus. She was only 62 years old. She contracted covid-19 in July and spent four months in the hospital. I’ve experienced grief many times throughout my life, but never like this. It has been only six months since her death, so I am certainly not an expert on how to handle the grief process of losing a spouse, but for the sake of others hopefully I can bring you some encouragement.

The purpose of writing this blog is an attempt to help others who may be dealing with grief themselves, but this blog is not going to help you much if you don’t think in terms of eternity. By the way, eternity doesn’t begin the moment you die. Eternity has no beginning because God has no beginning. Naturally, I think about heaven much more now since she has passed. Let me clarify that – I don’t mean that I think about heaven in terms of an escape from this life. I do indeed look forward to that day when I’ll pass from this realm into that next realm but beyond that, I’m becoming more and more aware of just how thin that veil is between this realm that is visibly seen and that which is mostly unseen.

There is a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us (Hebrews 12:1) and I believe that cloud is made up of all who have gone before us who lived a life of faith. I won’t take the time to elaborate on that right now so I’ll leave it with you to meditate on. Becky was faithful to the Lord Jesus and I believe she is in that cloud. I believe the ones who are in that cloud are cheering us on every day of our lives. I take great comfort in that and it gives me courage also. I was brought up in a culture that mostly believed that heaven was far off somewhere and we are down here and it seems like most people still think that way. Jesus tells us that the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand, or in other words it is within reach. I have found myself on occasion lamenting the fact that Becky will not be around to see certain events take place such as our granddaughter growing up. However, knowing the goodness of our God, it wouldn’t surprise me one bit that he just might allow her to look in on certain events taking place in our lives.

I prayed, believed, and declared that we would once again witness the healing and restorative power of Christ and my dear Becky would get up out of that hospital bed and come back home to me. We had seen it time and time again. A couple of friends had even said that she was like a cat with nine lives. It had happened before and it was going to happen again…until it didn’t. She didn’t get out of the bed and she didn’t come home to me.

Bill Johnson says, “The walk of faith is to live according to the revelations we have received in the midst of the mysteries we can’t
explain.” I can’t explain why we didn’t get the outcome we prayed for. What I do know is that I came out of this valley shadowed by death with a deeper revelation of how much He loves me and Him being ever present. I am more keenly aware of His love than I was before. It makes no sense when I try to understand it logically. It is to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge (Ephesians 3:19).

When Jesus taught his disciples how to pray, using what we now refer to as The Lord’s Prayer, he said to pray give us this day our daily bread. I began a practice years ago of getting up a little extra early every morning and spending some time with the Lord. Jesus tells us that He is the bread which has come down from heaven (John 6). He has become the bread that I crave first thing every morning. I call my time with Him “sitting with Jesus.” Most of the time I worship, pray, read some scripture, sit quietly and listen, then I usually write down my thoughts or a passage. Sometimes I will take myself through an intentional season of mind renewal. I will usually spend at least 21 days replacing an old negative thought with a new positive thought. For example, Holy Spirit revealed to me that I had a toxic thought that “I and others who fail are unworthy of love and deserve to be punished”. I won’t take time to tell you the many ways that thought manifested in my life and relationships with others but I’ll just say it wasn’t pretty. I knew that I had to eliminate it, so the thought that I replaced it with was “I and others are always the object of his love”.

During the time of Becky’s illness and after her passing I’ve had many people say things like “I don’t know how you made it through all of that”! I don’t know either! All I know is that every morning I had to start my day by letting Him love me and then making it my mission to love her, whether on the phone with her (even that was extremely limited at times) during quarantine or being at her bedside when I could.

Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?
(Romans 8:35 NASB)

To be continued…