Just as I was ready to fall off into a deep sleep, thoughts of the circumstances surrounding the death of my child began to sweep around in my head. All of a sudden, the regret, the guilt, the remorse, the shame and the “should of, would of, could have’s” started to take hold. As usual, I began to entertain the thoughts, thinking through each scenario yet again. Every time I would do something different than what I had done, my thoughts would swiftly come to the same conclusion, over and over again; if I had made another choice, my son would be here now, but he is not. Which means, it was all your fault, you are a failure, his death could have been prevented and on and on the insidious thoughts go. I have come to a point where I don’t stay here as long as I used to and, in fact, these thoughts do not come as often, but they do come, typically on trigger days or when I am super emotional. I can now instantly recognize the great lie and I have been equipped to speak truth into my mind instead of the “What if I had…?” script that comes from the pit of darkness. The enemy of my soul is so cunning and crafty, he knows exactly when I am weak, when I become preoccupied with the external, and here he comes; he bombards me with the situation surrounding my son’s passing because he would rather me focus on that than the beautiful life we had together, because then I would have the inability to see God’s sovereign hand in my life and I am unable to make sense of what my Lord has in store for me in this new season.
Jeremiah 29:11 says, “For I know the plans I have for you, declares the LORD, plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” The Lord has been slowly teaching me these last three years to see Him in everything, to understand that all things that are occurring have been ordained by Him and for Him, and that no matter what, He has a plan and a purpose for me. He knows the desires of my heart, but I believe He also knows my tendency to become caught up with external difficulties because after all, I have always believed that I am the total sum of who I am as a result of my reactions to what I have gone through. My problem lies with my tendency to lay my head down on my pillow and re-write conversations with what I should have said and redo situations with what I could have done instead of coming to Him and asking for forgiveness or for wisdom on how I could have handled it better or for compassion and understanding for the other person involved. In other words, I always think about myself and how I could have done it better. The difference is that in those circumstances, there has always been a hope that I could right the wrong or go to that person and have a do-over, but with the death of a loved one, there is no hope of ever changing what happened; there is no altering the course of destiny; there are no second chances, there are no revisions, it is done, it is over and it is final. The only place left to go is to our Heavenly Father and the only possible resolution to the dilemma is to hold on to the promises of our Lord that He has given us, and that is a hope for the future that one day, He will make everything right and we will be reconciled with that person once again.
John 13:7 says, "You do not realize now what I am doing, but later you will understand." I’m at that tender point in my grief journey where I am truly beginning to forgive myself for all the things I felt I should have done and allow myself the grace to just be okay with what happened knowing I did the best I could, but here lies the problem: There is nothing I can do about any of it. For someone like me, with my type A personality, who wants to do something, anything, to fix what happened there is no amount of spinning that can be done that will undo the fact that my son is no longer here and the magnitude of that reality is so incredibly heavy that it crushes me to the core. So each morning when I rise, I ask my Heavenly Father to help me hold onto the hope that one day I will understand God’s sovereign hand in all of this. And each time I come to Him, He gently woos me into His presence and tells me that one day the sun will shine forever and will never set, that one day the moon will always glow brightly and not recede, and that one day the Lord will be my everlasting light because my days of sorrow and grief will end and I will be with my child in heaven forever and ever. Oh, how I long for that day.
