Butterfly Chronicles Volume 42: Lord Haste the Day

Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight and forever my soul will be well.

 I melt through moments.

Life’s tapestry tick tock tick tock tick tock won’t stop.

Reading again ( http://www.biblestudycharts.com/A_Daily_Hymn.html) the story of Horatio Gates Spafford and his hymn “It is Well With My Soul” I was taken with the words of the first verse which I hadn’t really studied before:

When peace, like a river, attendeth my way,
When sorrows like sea billows roll;
Whatever my lot, Thou has taught me to say,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

Whatever my lot – You, God, have taught me to say, “It is well with my soul.”

Horatio should’ve been named Job 2.  I finally understood that ole Horatio may not have, like Job did not, FEEL well in his soul, but “it is well with my soul” is what God wants us to say, has taught us to say. 

Reading each of Horatio’s verses, I realized not once does he say his soul is well with the tragedies which devastated his life.  He was taught to say it is well when sorrows like sea billows roll, but through the rest of the song, what is well with his soul is Christ and His perfect work on the cross.  Horatio’s song always made me feel like a failure because I can’t really say it is well with my soul about Zach.  Horatio couldn’t either.  We say it is well because God who loves us so much has ultimately made it ALL well with our souls – in and for eternity.

Horatio knew that and says so in the rest of his song:

Though Satan should buffet, though trials should come,
Let this blest assurance control,
That Christ has regarded my helpless estate,
And hath shed His own blood for my soul.

It is well with my soul…

My sin, oh, the bliss of this glorious thought!
My sin, not in part but the whole,
Is nailed to the cross, and I bear it no more,
Praise the Lord, praise the Lord, O my soul!

It is well with my soul…

And Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight,
The clouds be rolled back as a scroll;
The trump shall resound, and the Lord shall descend,
Even so, it is well with my soul.

It is well, with my soul,
It is well, with my soul,
It is well, it is well, with my soul.

I wait for my soul to feel better.  It doesn’t.  It only gets different.  Different pains, different knowings, different missings, different panics, different.  It just gets different.

Boy stories, hunting blinds, a brave raccoon, a dead duck.  A story missing a character.  All the world’s a stage and ours is missing a player.

Life all different - meeting in a place where memories and cousins and stories rapturously explode in the now and what will never be a Zach memory.  Constant flip frame of what will be, but for us will not.  I live and swing at the park and smile and swim and laugh.  I hold on to the here and the who is here now. 

I live the laughter and joy of my family and I hold on knowing  I have no more photo moments with my smiling boy or lip curling boy who didn’t want that frame snapped. A missing hider and counter and chaser and laugher in the hide and seek games. Where are those boy noises I sometimes shushed?  Where is the rough hug?  Where is the part of me he took with him?

I wish I could be encouraging and say that time heals.   In 9 months, it doesn’t feel healed – at all.  And I’m tired of hearing I’m better or I look better or I act better.  Climb inside me.  How could you know?  If I said it did – that time heals, I’d lie.   The pain changes and morphs from and into I know not what until I’m showered in the hurt.  I’m swimming in a sea of not knowing what will loose me from the life boat. 

Will it be the visit to Target where I walk past the boy’s section? Will it be the 5 o’clock man shadow growing across the faces of the about to be men I know?  Will it be a series of graduation slide shows spilling life in places Zach will never be?  Is it a lacrosse stick or lacrosse tale or lacrosse sticker on the back of a car?  Is it walking past the tree at soccer where Zach spent his last evening - my mind's eye watching him there, remembering?  Does this grief ever feel healed as I live each tick tock around a bend unsure if a new hurt will unveil, or if I’ve safely escaped a new onslaught?  Never knowing what will joggle my soul to sorrow…wanting to live in the moments of the Michael, Taylor, Madison journeys, and cousin times and cousin and friend stories - I want to live all those alive - just sometimes needing a quiet rest, a time to deposit away the living tick tocks as life's files grow thicker while Zach's remain the same.  Gliding in and out of my soul trying to be well.

Don’t accuse me of loosing my faith.  It wouldn’t be true.  I have been taught to say it is well with my soul even though it is not because in eternity it will be, and I really do believe it, but how do I deal with a chameleon pain that never two moments in a row is the same or what unfurls to unleash it is not the same?  Is it okay to just be overcome and not try to fight back on every front because I don’t have enough arrows in my quiver to wound this enemy?  It is really only well with my soul because I know the Lord – not because it feels that way.

Is this the burden I lay at Your holy feet?  Are these the cares I cast on You?  Where is the dotted line on which I sign that guarantees a cease fire in the grief battle?  And if the wounds still open time after time, what skin are you growing on me to thicken, toughen, urge me to courage?

Stand still.  I will deliver, You say.

I will fight for you today, You tell me.

I say, good.  I’m not up to it; my quiver is empty and my soul quivers.

It is well with my soul – I’ve been taught to say, and I believe it.  I just don’t feel it.

Lord, haste the day when my faith shall be sight and forever my soul will be well.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 41: Hello Zach

Deliver us, O Jehovah.

Dear Zach,

I’ve been stuck, still feel stuck.  Writing is my way of “therapy-ing” through this situation, and I haven’t been able to make any sense with words.  I write and write and write, but can’t seem to write down what I need to get out of my head.

I talked with Nana Pony about it this week.  The split person I am.  Trying to knit myself back together where what I know is real and what is real is what I know, and I just can’t seem to find the right glue or thread or staples or stitches.  As another mother without her child said, “How do I believe the impossible?”  And not only how do I believe it, how do I live with it?

People mean well.  I know they do.  But I don’t live on the same planet with most of them anymore.  I’ve lost a part of me in a way that most people will never experience, and so much of what I know and feel can’t be shared.  I don’t isolate; I am just isolated.

I understand isolation.  I understand why it is necessary.  I like it.  It is easier.  Every day, I have to think about how much each step in a day will take out of me.  Leaving the house and grocery shopping takes 3 out of 10 unless I meet someone I know, and then it takes 7 out of 10, and I have to come home and be alone again.  Strange.  Very.  I’m an actress in a play I didn’t write. I speak and listen and share as if I am the old me, but I don’t even know the me who is talking.  I’m playing dress-up in my own life.

 

So, I plan things.  Carefully.  Like a doctor’s visit.  An hour to Houston, an hour in her office, moments spent trying to answer her questions, tell her about you without actually talking about it, and then receiving her tears, and I’m so sorry’s, and I can’t imagines, and you won’t ever get over it, and then an hour drive home.  A  10 out of 10.  Isolation.   Back to quiet.  Trying to write, to spend some of the grief on paper rather than in tears.

Today, Friday.  Lunch.  A new friend.  It’s all I’m doing, and I’m prepared so the take it out of me number will be low, and there will be me left to share with Madison and Taylor and Michael when I get home.  A new someone who will know me from now instead of from then and now.  Something new.  It is a step.

So much has happened in the near past.  Taylor’s a graduate, employed, has a boyfriend, is heartbroken but moving forward missing you all along the way. She inspires me.  Madison went to camp for a week.  Not once (at least that she would admit) did she get homesick.  She slowly grows up wise beyond her years. Life moves one day at a time.  Madison points out the butterflies – always.

 Madison still doesn’t talk much about you, but Gunner is common ground.  Hunting dog needs to run so we run him. One day I told her, as Gunner sprinted in and out and up and down and around and back again on the greenbelt, that I think you are happy that we are running him.  Zach is happy mom, she said.  Zach is happy we are doing it.  She asked me if Gunner misses you.  No, I said.  Gunner knows Zach is dead.  He came in the room that night and saw and smelled Zach. Gunner knows.  But I don’t think he’s sad.  Zach, I think Gunner knows he will see you again in heaven.  I think God does that for animals, to keep them from being sad. I think a lot of things I never thought before.

Zach, I can’t imagine what it is like for your dad to be without you.  I am a mom; how could I know?  How could I know what it is like to be a father without his son.   I see the pain and all this hurt all around because of you.  I just wish I could take it all on myself and give everyone a rest from it. Give your dad a rest from it.  We all need a rest from it.

Did you know, Zach, that this week you gave a gift to a friend .  You did that, and maybe God had it planned all along that you would gift a mother whose child didn’t die. It was a dead thing on a shelf until God said let it live in the life of another.  A good thing to touch what your fingers had touched and to let it live.  You gave a gift and you aren’t even here.

 Strange thing this life without you, but really you are everywhere - in our house in our minds in our hearts in the fabric of what holds us together as a family – everywhere.

So these are the days and moments and scales that I measure a life on now.  I try to live what is important.  Being home.  Hemming pants.  Making hotdogs.  Holding hands. Listening, talking, being.  I water my butterfly garden and wait for caterpillars and butterflies.  I want to live in the quiet.

I read my Bible.  I pray.  I wait. I wonder why God didn’t take me instead.  I think about what God is doing and why, and I know I will never know, and I hope that someday that will be okay.  Now, it just makes me sad.  Life is made up of moments, Zach.  Some moments scar and change lives forever.  We miss you.   And in all my sorrow, pain, self pity, confusion, questioning, doubting, fear, shame, guilt, and frustration, the butterflies just keep coming, and I say hello, Zach.  Every day.

I love you son.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 40: Graduation

Her graduation verses:  Proverbs 3:5-6

Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding; in all your ways submit to Him and He will make your paths straight.

 

Taylor’s graduation looms – 24 students on future’s runway fueling for flight.  Homeschooling is different from “regular” school in so many good and bad ways, but graduation is one of the best – God is welcome – exalted – praised openly and unabashedly, a front row seat – no back alleys or whispered prayers for Him here.  Last year, I attended my first one – my first homeschool graduation.  Amazing.  A witness to the power of Jesus Christ from beginning to end.

I am nervous.  At last year’s graduation, I boohoo’ed through the whole thing, and I barely knew any of the kids graduating.  It was just such a testimony to the Lord to watch parents who have lived through homeschooling and who have raised their children moment by moment to His glory finally come to the end of that journey and gently release their children into the sky of future dreams.  A metamorphosis.

Now, it is Taylor’s turn.  She is ready.  My broken heart beating with a passionate pride and resonating prayer for God’s blessing on her life, her steps, her paths, her decisions -all to His glory – that’s what I pray for her.

Last year I cried.  This year…I just hope I can make it through the ceremony without passing out from lack of air uptake in a tear stained snot stuffed up nose.  Prayer.  That’s my only hope.  The overwhelming joy of Taylor’s successes culminating in this ceremony is huge, yet we will all tip toe around another place where Zach’s chair will be empty.  Another day he won’t be there to celebrate in the life of our family.  I know, I know. He’s face to face with the Savior and all that, but my heart still aches and breaks and has a hole.  There’s a jagged, black, deep hole of missing him even though I know where he is.

Fall Apart, the song Taylor chose to play during her ceremony slide show presentation, speaks volumes about what she’s been through this “senior” year – a year growing her faster to old than should’ve been, and the song speaks her walk this year in such a way that I never could.  She chose it - the song that sings her story. I am excitedly looking forward to watching her graduation unfold – tissues, lots of tissues, a must.  Her song; her journey; her butterfly metamorphosis into future flight - thank you God for all the gifts you gave us in her and those you gave to her. 

Trust the Lord, Taylor.  He will make your paths straight.  Fly sissy.  Fly high!

Her song…

Fall Apart

Why in the world did I think I could
Only get to know you when my life was good?
When everything just falls in place
The easiest thing is to give you praise
Now it all seems upside down

'Cause my whole world is caving in
But I feel you now more than I did then
How can I come to the end of me
But somehow still have all I need?
God I want to know you more
Maybe this is how it starts
I find you when I fall apart

Blessed are the ones who understand
They've got nothing to bring but empty hands
Nothing to hide and nothing to prove
Our heartbreak brings us back to you
And it all seems upside down

'Cause my whole world is caving in
But I feel you now more than I did then
How can I come to the end of me
But somehow still have all I need?
God I want to know you more
Maybe this is how it starts
I find you when I fall apart

I don't know how long this will last
I'm praying for the pain to pass
But maybe this is the best thing that has ever happened to me

'Cause my whole world is caving in
But I feel you now more than I did then
How can I come to the end of me
But somehow still have all I need?

God I want to know you more
Maybe this is how it starts
I find you when--
You will find me when--
I fall apart

Fall Apart by Josh Wilson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3EWHPp80EA

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 39: The Power of Prayer

New every morning are His mercies.

Last night it stormed.  Shaking the walls and jolting me out of slumber, thunder erupted and lightening poured through the blind slats.  I went to bed late; I didn't sleep well.

Yet, somewhere between writing it all down last night and prayers going up, I feel better today.  Stronger, more able to block the thoughts that bring me down.  I really do know that God is there, the butterflies are His gift to me, my family, and everyone who shares the butterflies with us.

As the day ambles on toward tonight, I'm sure the day's stuff will weigh on me, and the tired will bring that hard to wrestle sadness.  While I am strong and feeling hope, I wanted that person who may be having an awful, miserable, lonely day to know that God is there, He cares, He wants me, you, all of us to cast every care we have on Him, and I want that person to know especially that His mercies are new every morning, and His faithfulness is great, infinite, always more than enough.

I don't know all those people who pray for us.  I just know that those prayers are making all the difference.  Zach, I believe, knows about your prayers and mine.  He's okay, I'm not okay, and that has to be okay, until God walks us through to a better place or just holds us in this one.

To God be the Glory for the things He has done through those of you lifting us up.  Prayer - so powerful, so perfect, so purposeful - will not go unheard or unfelt.  I feel it.  It feels peaceful, happy, thankful.

His mercies are new every morning.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 38: Me-Gideon

"O my lord, if the Lord is with us, why then has all this happened to us?"

  

I am overwhelmed with sadness, guilt, shame, self loathing, and all that jazz.  And covered, shrouded, engulfed by butterflies.  Everywhere, they are just everywhere.

I’ve become Gideon.  Trying hard to just call the butterflies a myth, not real, imagined, not from God – like I’m daring Him to skip a day and at the same exact moment absolutely hoping He won’t.

Everything’s all jumbled and making no sense.

The list of all the ways I went wrong with Zach is a line around the building kind of long.  Peter MD always asks me if I’m isolating.  Yes, as much as possible.  It’s too hard to be around people and “be” normal – like I will ever be normal again – I'm the self that mothered Zach into the grave.  I don’t want anyone’s opinion on how I should think differently or better or Godly or holy or trusting or whatever the advice might be.  Put my shoes on and then you can say whatever you want.  Otherwise, be quiet.  Is this the angry, depressed, hopeless stage of grief.  Who cares.

There’s still a black worm hole in my mind where the knowledge of what’s happened is hidden.  After almost 8 months, the almost time it took to grow Zach in my womb, I still can’t connect what happened to real reality.  Lately, the movie of that night is played over and over and over in my brain like it happened to someone else but my mind understands it happened to us but at the same time won’t believe that it happened at all – when is Zach coming home?  Your football jersey hangs empty, waiting.  Come home.

I drift into sleep the images playing and wake to them in the morning.  The reel looping around and around again and again. Things don’t get better, just different and harder as the time lapses and I don’t want to be around people who think I should be living all is well when I can’t even look at his pictures.  My stomach lurches when I see him, look at him, remember that last moment of him, how him there on the floor is my fault.  How does a mother not want to see her boy?  How can that be right?  Pictures too painful. Another mother thing I don't have right. 

So many can’ts in life now.  Can’t look at his photo.  Can’t sleep without dread dreams.  Can’t help wanting and needing to isolate from people.  Can’t feel hope. Can’t talk about it.  Can’t socialize.  Can’t listen to what others think I should or should not do.  Don’t care.  Can’t know what I know to be true is true.  God.  He’s true and real and alive.  But right now I’m Gideon.  Make the ground wet, and me dry.  Rain on me, but keep the ground dry.  One butterfly, 10 butterflies, a hundred, a thousand, every every every day butterflies and still You must show me more.  Show me it’s You.  Tell me Zach is warm and cuddled and loved by a better love than I failed to give him.  I want to know and believe and know.

I can only write it down trying to make sense of the senseless.  Don’t make me speak words out loud – the price is too high, a price I can’t survive.  I can’t be me and I don’t know who I am supposed to be.  I don't like the me I've been.  Make me invisible or make me new again.

When God knew how this parenting mothering would turn out, why didn’t He give Zach to someone else?  Someone who could get it right.  Someone who could grow him all the way to grown-up.  Mother’s day…and my son is dead. And motherhood is so scary now.  A mystery of how to be different, squeeze out a different ending, fix what’s broken; with Zach it’s too late.  Too late.  Forever too late for me to mother my son and get it right.  And my daughters – how do I get it right with them?  How does a broken mother – mother?  And they are precious, and I love them with my whole self and do they know and feel and see and hear that love?  Zach on the floor - somehow, I did it all wrong. This mothering.  Now, how do I get it right, better, different, or is it the same?  And if I didn’t know with Zach, how can I know ever at all?

Right now I feel I deserve to feel a floundering failure, hanging off the edge of a cliff, only air under my feet, barely clinging to a life with a road ahead.  Barely.  So many times in reliving the life history of my life’s mistakes, I wondered if God would punish me by taking my child or children.  I shared this with another mother who shared the same feelings with me.  Is this punishment because it sure doesn’t feel like grace unless the grace is for Zach and God saving him from me.  If this is self pity, I don’t know how to not ask these questions;  I don’t know how to stop my mind careening dangerously around the bends of my life to arrive at a place where I am okay.  And only God can do it but is He even there and are the butterflies just my wish that He is really real and Zach is really there and this is really working together for good.  Isn’t that ridiculous to imagine – that a mother’s son is dead and that’s working toward some good?  His ways, God's ways, are not my ways.  His thoughts are not my thoughts.  My thoughts are deeply dark and just sad.  Sad.

Would I be thinking a different way if Zach had gone some other way?  I don’t wear those shoes so how can I know?  How can I know another mother’s grief when I can’t even decipher my own?  Sad.  Ugly.  Dark.

Maybe there is one other person this writing might help or ease the aloneness and sorrow over the too lateness, the unchangeable, the endless why’s and what if’s.  No matter how much it is said, no matter how much others wish it to not be so, I know that if Zach had been given another mother, a better mother, a different mother, that night wouldn’t be the nightmare.  And if I’d known, would I have given him up to that mother to change the ending - like the mother who gave her babe to keep him from being cut in half.  Could I be that mother?  How would a mother give up a son, but I do want a different ending, a different mother, a mother who could’ve known and helped and saved.  I wasn’t different.  I didn’t know.  I didn’t help.  I didn’t save.  Another mother I wasn’t.  I am just me and it wasn’t enough.  And how do I live with that?  How do I keep taking steps?  Michael, Taylor, Madison.  Step…step…step…faltering step by step.

If only.  I wish.  It’s too late.  Why God did you give him to me?  How can this be Your plan?  How can this be worked together for good?  Butterflies. ? ? ?  How why what if if only.  I’m Gideon.  I need the butterflies – even though right now this life minute I can hardly believe in them any more.  I’m broken.  It doesn’t feel like healing; it feels like hell.  I need to believe in butterflies even when I can’t.  Hear the prayers I can’t speak.  I don’t want to pray.  I’m too tired.  To heavy are the weighted shoes I wear. 

Isn’t truth that things have to continue the down spiral to bring the Savior back to gather us to Himself.  I don’t want a better world.  I don’t want the tides to turn.  I want to be swept up into the bosom of Christ and end this nightmare – seeing Zach in the light of the Lord’s face to face.  Trudge onward Christian soldier.  Wounded, bleeding, hopeless, toward the Hope that will heal.  Trudge on.  When will it be well with my soul?  Trudge on.  Lord make it so.

 Lord, why?  Why has this happened to us?

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 37: Grief Still Sucks

 

O Lord, make haste to help me

Today was the deadline.




Due?  Insurance enrollment.  I was fine.  Almost done. And then there it was.  I was unprepared. I had to delete Zachery Michael Sinclair.  Can you imagine deleting your child?  Will this ever get any easier?

It will always just be what it is.  It sucks.  Very hard week full of butterflies.  Come quickly, Lord.  Come quickly.

Butterfly Chronicles Volume 36: Relationships

Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.

Relationship.  That's what we're called to have.  Christ wants relationship not religion.  In living a different life without Zachery - living with his death, living a whole new family life - this has caused me to really, deeply contemplate my relationship with the Lord.  Before Zachery died, I was a Christian.  I believed.  I studied, read, learned, attended a Bible study church; my faith was strong.  But it was as strong as a cheap, wet paper napkin - and I didn't even know it.

It's funny how I kinda lived life thinking I was really something in the Lord.  Having studied and memorized many verses as a child, I could quote my Bible, tell the stories, share the Gospel, and "be" a Christian.  What I know now is that "being" a Christian isn't the same thing as being in a relationship with Jesus Christ.

Think about the hallmarks of remarkable relationships:  honor, integrity, trust, loyalty, honesty, steadfastness, kindness, caring, selflessness, love through thick and thin til death do us part.  Relationship.  I'm only now beginning to understand that idea - Christ wants relationship.  Before Zachery died, I didn't really comprehend the idea of complaining or yelling or screaming or laughing at or with God, with Jesus.  But isn't that relationship?  Aren't the best relationships those where we can bare our souls, hearts, hurts, scars, hilarity, joy, laughter til tears.  Isn't that relationship?

How did I miss that simple concept.  I won't put it tritely - Jesus doesn't want to be my friend.  He's the holy God, creator of the Universe - not my friend.  But He is my champion.  He is my Savior.  He is my grace.  He is who I can crawl to with my best and worse - I mean He already knows it all anyway - so why have I been slow to grow to know that He wants me to share it all with him - the good, the bad, the ugly - and so often what I need to share is bad and ugly. Yep, that's me.  That's honestly me and Lord, You already know.  So what did I miss and why didn't I talk and speak to you like we are in a real, tangible, loving relationship?  How did I not know how to pray and that prayer is conversation, truth, all of it - complaining, screaming, laughing, sharing, loving - all of it.

Relationship.  To have relationship, I have to trust, honor, be loyal and steadfast, cry out in joy, pain, love, hate, imperfection, scarred, brokenhearted, and laughing.  He wants it all.  Imagine that.  No matter what it is, He already knows.  His grace is ALREADY sufficient for me - even if I am just figuring out what that really means.

I read a poster on Pinterest the other day that said,

"Sometimes the things we can't change end up changing us." 

 Wow.  Truth.  Zach, I can't change.  And that has changed me.  It has changed my relationship with Him and with everyone else.  Every day the butterflies come.  Every day I realize that the more I know the Lord, the more inexaustible He becomes and the more humble I grow knowing that if I were to read and study, study and read God's word every second of every minute of every hour of every day for the rest of my life, I'd still be barely out of the "milk" stage.  Relationship.  Give it to Him.  He will carry the burden of all those things we can't change which change us.  Relationship.  Trust Him.  He knows already everything we wish He didn't know and He loves us anyway.  Imagine that.  The Holy God, creator of the universe, Savior - He loves us anyway.

Relationship.  He will give you rest.