Tuesday, September 30, 2008

Day One Hundred


Today is the 100th day since we started receiving the daily grief/share emails. One hundred days and that was just some random day that I happened to see the email with the link that had been sent by a friend quite some time before that.

So anyway the topic for today's email was the goodness of God. The daily reading from the "One Year Book of Hope" that somebody sent us, happened to be on the same theme. Yesterday I read "A Grief Observed" by C.S. Lewis. He writes about how he wrestled with that question after his wife died of cancer.

Saturday, September 20, 2008

Tears and Overwhelming Pain


This week was so, so very hard - just reliving all the pain and being pushed into fresh waves of pain. Maybe it was supposed to be therapeutic.

Oh, Renee, I'm just so very sorry that you had to suffer so much. This is more than I can bear, and I'm so sorry I could not do more for you. Jesus suffered way more than we can imagine to set us free and we must always keep that in mind. Renee, you desired so much to experience and practice the presence of God in your life and now you are in His presence and we cannot even imagine what that must be like.

But I wish I could at least have just one more conversation with you, Renee, make one more smoothie for you, watch another movie with you, make the leukemia go away, make the pain go away, see you continue serving the Lord, maybe get married some day, see you make all the movies and documentaries you were hoping and dreaming and planning to do. I love you Renee and I always will. I'm so sorry.

Oh God, if you can use the story of Renee's life and what you did for her and through her and in her to bring even one person to invite Jesus into their heart it will be worth it. But right now I'm feeling very sad. I don't want to just think about myself and wallow in self-pity but I have to work through my grief somehow.

The verse for this week from the book - One Year Book of Hope was about the Lord being close to the brokenhearted. I need to trust that God is close and wants to comfort me in my distress.