All is well, I know. But nonetheless I’ve had another really challenging day. Yes, my heart is well and truly broken and I can’t stop thinking about Jane, and how much I miss her. More than that, with every fibre of my being I long to be with her, I need her to be with me. Life feels so very empty. Of course I know it isn’t, and that God has good things set before me, and my life can never truly be empty when the Lord is as close as close can be. But for sure, today it feels like it. And the strange thing is that I believe the Lord has opened my heart to embrace sadness once more for this time of mourning. So I’ve chosen to engage and not resist, with the sure and certain hope that I’m journeying with the Lord. I have to trust that it’s for good purpose and not just an indulgence; yes my hope is that at some point in the near future I really will be able to move on, let go of Jane and take hold of whatever the Lord sets before me. I don’t know how that’s going to work out, but I do know that I will not continue in mourning forever and a day. Jane is fine where she is, living in the eternal presence of Jesus in paradise. She faithfully completed her race and receives her reward, even today. One day we’ll meet up again, but in the meantime I have a new life to live and new stuff to do, new people to meet and new places to go. I have to let go and move on!
Yes, I have complete confidence that the Lord is with me at this challenging time. Whilst I don’t claim the detail to be anything more than my imagination, I have had a couple of repeated special experiences with the Lord over these past two days. During the last couple of years of Jane’s life she took to playing the tin whistle, and many times when I picked up my guitar she would pick up one of her whistles. I loved it. It took me back to the time when my eldest girls sang with me, and in my photo, from around 15 years ago, my son-in-law is also hiding at the back having fun with his bass guitar. A privileged way to spend a Sunday morning. So then, a few months before Jane died she was quite ill with the beginnings of serious problems in her lungs, and I was booked to perform a Christmas song at church. She was almost too ill to leave home, but did, and then at the last minute she walked to the front of the meeting to join me, produced a whistle and we played together in public for the first and last time… until yesterday! So there I was lost in worship, playing a whole selection of songs and I suddenly became very aware of the presence of God. Then the thought came that in some mysterious way I was joining in the worship of heaven, though sometimes I wonder if it might be the other way round. Maybe the host of heaven cannot resist joining in our worship? Anyway, I suddenly had the strongest sense that Jane was in heaven, right then, worshipping the Lord in exactly the same way that I was… only she was playing a whistle.
Hebrews 12:1 ‘Therefore, since we are surrounded by such a huge crowd of witnesses to the life of faith’ (NLT)
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