My heart leaps into my throat every time that blog comes up highlighted in my feed reader. I think: Oh Amy, how are you doing?
And what have you got to tell us?
She is writing about how things knit together, and I am experiencing a certain knit-togetherness too. Her Michael died suddenly, on the tenth day after my Mark had his own narrow escape from an avalanche in the Utah mountains. I was still reeling from the sense of the narrowness of that escape, still horrified by the details he described to me, still grateful that he had survived and come back to us, still finding it all too easy to imagine how my life would be different if he had not come back.
And then came Amy's news to her readers.
Almost immediately after his near miss, Mark began a series of long-planned, days-long business trips that will keep him more away than home for several weeks. I have been living without him a lot. I have had ample time to be grateful and to keep Amy and all others who have lost husbands, fathers, in my constant prayers.
Each of her rare posts since her husband's death has contained a pure gift to me. A teaching that I needed. Gratitude, but other things too.
* * *
I received a certain consolation in prayer, the night that Mark explained to me the details of his narrow miss. The children were asleep and I was alone in our living room. I wondered aloud why, why so many good things? Why so many gifts in our lives? Why this one? We sometimes laugh darkly at each other and say, "'From him to whom much is given, much will be expected'... We must be in for it." That night I was almost angry, accusing. Why so many good things? Why so many blessings? What have you got in store for me? When will I have to pay for all this?
And then the consolation came, quite clear, and it was: If it had happened, if Mark had been gone and left only me to raise the children, if if if.... then all the good things that came before would have been enough to sustain me and strengthen me. And that is what they would have been for. If it had happened. They would have been given to me not as something I had to pay back, but a free gift to give me what I need. And with it came a quiet confidence that sorrow, however it may come, will not be able to keep me from doing what I have to do. Because my weaknesses, the holes and faults and missing pieces in me, have been filled, are being filled. With an abundance of blessings.
What a strange sort of revelation, but a peaceful one. To him from whom much will be asked... much will be given. The corollary.
And so Amy's posts have struck me with a peculiar odd resonance. I don't say that Mark and his avalanche happened because she was going to lose Michael, or that she lost Michael because of something to do with Mark and the avalanche. That is way too simplistic, and narcissistic too. I feel only caught up by a thread or two in the knitting-together. What Amy is writing, because she needs to write it, is reaching my ears and finding a place where it needs to be heard.
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