It is vacation time, for what we could muster in a state hopping with COVID and our personal losses mounting on several fronts. To complement the restorative glory of our seaside rental, our daughter and grans joined us for two weeks.

I dropped my girl and the kids off at the Orlando airport last night. Headed back to the condo I passed through a log jam caused by five fire trucks and one of the most horrible wrecks I have ever seen. On a darkened stage pelted by rain, there were 10-15 emergency personnel gathered in a circle, holding hands with heads bowed. Not a single fireman was working the wreck.

Sacred. And deeply moving.

Someone died. Perhaps a whole family. And someone else got that horrible news last night.

Horrible news is becoming the norm in a way that threatens to shake us to our core. I do not welcome death and loss, but I do welcome the unseating of everything in my life masquerading as security in a world where true Security can only be found in the Person of Jesus Christ. I am inviting God to use global and exclusive plights to spotlight this truth for me with greater clarity, to refresh my God orientation with Him in His rightful place.

Everyday life’s demands attempt to take Jesus off center-stage. To replace Him with urgencies, plans for reconfigurations to win back homeostasis in our lives, to coronate a false security that looks more like control and predictability than yieldedness to our wild God.

We need Jesus now more than ever. In Jesus there is peace. In Jesus we endure losses knowing there is coming a glorious restoration of all things. In Jesus there is healing and Hope.

Because of Christ, in a time of great pain, we have comfort to give others. (II Corinthians 1:4) ​With so much bad news, we have Good News to share. (I Corinthians 15:1)

​I remember the rush of bitterness washing over me in the bowling alley. I was less than ten years old, spending my Sunday afternoon along with my siblings being entertained by our father. It was our weekly visitation day, after the divorce, the day we got to represent our mother’s righteous demand for child support before a man who valued other things above his family.  As an adult I have far more grace for the brokenness behind failure. But when Holy Spirit returns such memories, there is a reason. 

The memory was triggered as I hiked a familiar trail alone in the isolation of the COVID-19 mandate to stay cloistered. Families are out in droves, staying in their cocooned clusters of “just us”. Stepping aside for a wife, toddler, and infant strapped to his daddy’s back, the memory flooded back to me in a flash. 

As a jaded child, I thought to myself looking around that bowling alley full of fathers and children, “If you had been there for your family when they needed you, you wouldn’t have to be here now in this meaningless ritual,” judging every sans-mother father there assigned a lane with his brood represented what our grouping did. Abandonment. Divorce. Feigned connection. 

My first response now is to invite Holy Spirit into this memory, into this pain that is still trigger-able for a reason. A wound unrecognized and therefore untended. 

What memories is this current crisis triggering for you in this time of unpredictability and even chaos? What are you feeling? 

The temptation is to quickly sweep the discomfort to the side, to walk past without addressing the underlying wound or even the fresh gouging of new assaults against your heart. But there is an invitation in the pain, a wooing into communion with the Great Physician, the Counselor, the One Who bears our grief. God brings beauty straight out of the charred remains of ashes. 

Come Holy Spirit. Lead us into all truth. We invite the healing Balm of Gilead into our most hidden places of wounding, in Jesus’ name.

Earlier this week I had worked out a deal with a Turkish company to use my photography in a product they manufacture. The arrangement crashed upon discovery that some invisible quality of my photography is not good enough, resolution numbers behind the scenes defining how large my photos can be expanded. I use an iPhone as my camera. That is all I have. It has been enough, until it wasn’t. My inventory of thousands of pictures --  not good enough. 

Not good enough for some invisible, non-rectifiable reason that I do not really understand because it is numbers and math and technology.  Numbers. In the highest reading group, I nearly failed sixth grade over my non-existent math skills. I cheated to get through summer school and progressed on to the seventh grade. I am not proud of that. 

Not good enough reverberated through me today taking an ax swing at old wounds. It is not just my cherished but useless collection of photos, but all the things my heart has dreamed and not seen brought to fruition, including certain yearnings for my adult children, and restorative work in developing nations. Hope deferred, over and over again. Pain.  

Inadequacies lurk beneath my surface— not good enough to make everything all right for those I love. Outcomes I was never meant to control. Things I cannot see or understand this side of the veil. 

Can what God brings to fruition be enough to satisfy me? In truth, I need to find my satisfaction in Christ alone, not in the realization of all I desire. I have seen many well-meaning posts proclaiming, “I am enough!” I am not enough. I am not near enough. What I am however, is beloved, and in God, doors and opportunities open for me well beyond the sum of my strengths, likability, intellect or resources. 

He is enough. In the midst of recognition there are and will always be ways I cannot measure up, things my good heart cannot resolve, today He has reminded me in Him I am everything needed anyway. 

Join me in prayer? 

Father, Jesus, Holy Spirit, 
You alone are worthy, our God of mercy and grace Who invites us into Your inner sanctuary for communion. Open palms before You, we surrender to You once again all outcomes, unresolved crises, all the ways life screams at us about our inadequacies. We declare it is in our weakness Your strength is on full display. Your power is made perfect in our weakness as we yield to You, and draw near in utter dependency. We declare Your grace is sufficient; You are enough, and that is enough for us, in Jesus’ Name.

I've never lost a child. I have no idea what it feels like to be the parent of a child who has committed suicide, to grapple with devastating loss compounded by coming up short during inevitable brutal introspection.

We have all made mistakes parenting, but not all must come to peace with those mistakes in the face of tragic loss which screams condemnation that pours salt into gaping wounds. 

I've never lost my spouse. I came close in February 2015 when in the midst of a snowstorm I insisted, by the grace of God, that he let me take him to the ER when his chest pain escalated. It was pulmonary emboli, like buck shot through both lungs with the destruction of an entire lobe. (In celebration of his life, we used the green tubing from months of oxygen therapy as garland on our Christmas tree this year. Ha!)

So, I've been reflecting on loss and pain and what God offers our hearts in the midst of it all.

​This week I've been reading through Proverbs and pulling out the portion of verses that speak of the blessings of the righteous in order to pray declarative prayers.

"Righteous". 

That's how God sees those who embrace the cleansing work of the cross of Christ. God incarnate, God who came in the flesh to make me upright and to clear my name of all those things I've said, been, or done that I've struggled to forgive myself for. 

Proverbs 11:7 (BBE) says that "At the death of an upright man his hope does not come to an end...". 

What a promise.

Hope I can count on. No matter what.