Joy amid sorrow

We sat in the sanctuary, the same one where her casket laid almost 5 months ago exactly, and the grief washed over me once more.

I hid my face behind Abigail’s head as tears flowed freely down my cheeks. I contained my sobs only barely until finally, a familiar chord struck the piano and I could handle it no more. With Abigail wrapped tightly to my chest, I squeezed her close and made a quick exit out of the back of the room and slipped into a darkened classroom down the hall. Muffled sobs filled the small space as Abigail nursed quietly and her chubby little hand grabbed for my mouth, like always.

It was more than I could bear sitting in that room and trying to worship. Especially given why we were there. Our dear friends, a woman I would consider within my inner circle, leaving the country, being commissioned, going to unreached people. Gosh how I love these people. How a part of my heart rejoices in the work the Lord is doing in and through their precious family!

But the rest of me....

To the rest of me that commissioning service felt as much like a funeral as the one I’d sat through just five months before. The funeral that changed so much for us. The funeral that changed our lives forever, that took our dreams, our world, and flipped it upside down.

We were suppose to be departing for Kenya this month. I clinch my fist at God and ask Him why He even called us if He knew this would happen. I lay in the bed most nights and cry silent tears, mourning the loss of our dreams, our hopes, our future and all that I had imagined it to be.

I know this probably won’t make sense to many of you, but my heart was already gone. I fell in love with a people group I’d never met. Faces lacking detail slipped into my dreams, into my prayers and danced across my imagination as I pictured us living with them, earning their trust - and they ours - living along side them sharing with them the greatest, most certain love I’ve ever known. Sharing Him.

I gathered myself and Abigail, who by this time had finished nursing and had begun crawling all over the room looking for tiny objects to pincer grasp and put into her mouth. I wrapped her back onto my chest and snuck back into the sanctuary just as our pastor began speaking. I stared straight ahead, careful to not look around, in fear that I’d make eye contact with someone and they’d be privy to the depths of my pain.

And I sat there in that service feeling like we were burying yet another thing so precious to us.

Yes, this last 5 months have been hard. Hard because we lost our friend. Hard because our children still have weekly meltdown sessions where they collapse into our arms and tell us how much they miss their Paige. Hard because all we know to do, as parents, is simply sit and cry with them. No words will act as a healer. No perfect scripture will make the pain less real. Only tears and cuddles and rocking and the hope that one day we can remember her and it not crush us with grief and sadness.

But it’s been hard on so many other levels. Hard because WE were the family headed to Africa. WE were the ones who were excited to go and see. Hard because this life isn’t the one we’ve spent the last 3+ years preparing for.

“Mom, why aren’t we going to Africa? I want to go to Africa.”

Me too, baby. Me too.

This isn’t our plan A. Plan A was Africa.

We are buying a house. The house we are in now is a rental. It’s served us well over the last nearly 3 years but we are cramped. It’s seen us bring two babies home and our children grow from little kids into school aged children. We moved here with the knowledge that God was calling us somewhere else. It was temporary. We knew that from the get-go.

But now, we aren’t sure how temporary our new life is. There is no way we’d be effective missionaries right now. We’re too busy trying to hold ourselves together to minister to anyone else.

We looked at renting something bigger but it would nearly triple our monthly expenses, which was not an option we could afford or desired. Plus, I don’t know many landlords eager to rent to a family with 7 kids and a dog. The one that I did find in our budget never emailed me back when I told them how many kids we have.

So we found a foreclosure on a nice, large piece of land. It needs work. Lots of work. We’ll have to finish an entire basement, create bedrooms and bathrooms. But it’s doable and it won’t change the face of our budget too much, which is always a good thing.

But it’s bittersweet. This isn’t our plan A. This wasn’t even our plan B. This plan falls somewhere on the list of things we never really thought was in our immediate or 5 or 10 year plan. If you’d have asked me a year ago if we’d ever be homeowners again I’d have probably laughed at you. I saw us as nomads. Living life in rented spaces for as long as we possibly could.

But here we sit. Hoping to close sometime in the next month. Beginning renovations and moving in sometime this spring.

There will be no memories of Paige in this house. No late nights of eating peanut M&Ms as we sit on opposite ends of the couch and we tell each other our fears and dreams and plans. No memories of sitting across the kitchen table from potential supporters, pouring our hearts out to them and wondering if we are able to express to them just how much we love a people we’ve never met.

Part of that brings sweet relief. But another part of that bring such pain and sorrow. As we walked around the house yesterday with a contractor, explaining to him all that we have imagined for this new house, we didn’t have to talk about our old dreams. We didn’t feel the need to fill him in on the reasons why this house isn’t our plan A. He probably couldn’t even fathom that this wouldn’t be plan A.

And somewhere amid talking about flooring and where to put a laundry room and where to put the 5th bedroom and a play room, I found a speck of joy. Joy amid the sorrow. Joy creeping in that this is a fresh start. A new dream. A new hope. Something new to hold onto in the face of so much loss.

As I texted my friend Kate tonight, she reminded me that there must be ashes before they can be made beautiful. As I sit in Job’s ash heap, scraping my wounds, I look forward to the beauty. I pray it comes quickly. And I wonder how many more times we will find joy amid the sorrow. A sorrow often so deep that I cannot understand how the joy seeps in. But He allows it. He ordains it. And He provides it. This joy amid my sorrow. Proof once more that He is the giver all gifts. Even the ones we never, ever thought we’d ever ask for.