Tag: job

Bringing The Sacrifice of Praise

Job said, “I came naked from my mother’s womb, and I shall have nothing when I die. The Lord gave me everything I had, and they were his to take away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.” (Job 1:21 TLB)

It’s so easy to be thankful when things are going my way–

So easy to trust God when my pantry is full and my family safe;

So easy to laugh when pain is something I read about and don’t carry in my heart.

But how can I give thanks and say that God is good when I buried a child? How can my spirit make peace with the truth that God gives AND GOD TAKES AWAY?

True thanksgiving can’t spring from the notion, “it could be worse”. Guilt can’t lead me into the throne room of praise.  I can’t drag my broken heart to the table and mumble a makeshift prayer to a God I don’t believe will hear me.

Real thanksgiving rests on the bedrock of truth that it is ALL a gift.

Every moment.  Every breath.  Everything.

Even pain.

So today I will sit at our table and trust, missing Dominic, but loving the ones still here.

My heart hurts and it is hard but I will bring a sacrifice of praise to the God who gives and the God who takes away.

 

 

Running Ahead

From the start, if you didn’t want Dominic to do something, you couldn’t let him see you do it.  One glance and he memorized the steps to turn on the TV, the computer, the video player (yes, he was a child of the 90’s).  If he saw his dad use a hammer, the first chance he got to lay hands on one found him pounding away.  He was always up for being first.

I never thought he would be the first to get to heaven.

On April 12, 2014 my third born child, in the prime of his life, fit and healthy, strong and lovely, died in a motorcycle accident.

No warning.  No good-bye.

Here one instant, gone the next.  He was twenty-three and less than a mile from his apartment.

There are no words for the moment when your world is changed from what you imagine it can be to the unbearable reality of what it is.  The ache that begins in your gut and spreads to edges of your soul.  “My child is dead.”  You must repeat it to yourself because it cannot be true.  But it is.

I am a bereaved mother and join the millions of women who have buried a child.  It is no place for a mama-standing by her child’s grave.

This is not the life I would choose but it is the one I have been given.  I am learning to walk this new way, with this burden of grief on my shoulders. God is still God and I will choose to remember that.

“Though He slay me, yet will I hope in Him;” Job 13:15