Invisible

I miss him. I miss his arms around me, as I’ve said so often. His love languages were touch and service and I miss that, too. In the absence of both, I’ve wanted God to show up in person, take Rob’s place, sit across the table from me, and talk to me face to face. I know He doesn’t do that, though I’m not sure why, Biblical explanations aside. I only know that I sit alone at the table now, with no one to hug me or help me clear away dishes. And that God is invisible.

Which makes me feel invisible, too.

I have called this the Silence of God. It confuses me. He is, after all, Emmanuel, meaning God With Us. It makes me think I have a different definition for “with” than He does. “With” is how Rob lived with me. In person, up close and personal. He verbalized his thoughts. Lowered my blood pressure with his generous hugs. Helped me carry in groceries. Drove me to doctor appointments. Even kidded me about worrying over my test results, or his test results, or the both of us being admitted to a hospital.

Sometimes I have reason to worry, but it always helped to see his smile and the sparkle in his eyes. Does God have eyes? I’m not sure I’ve ever seen them even though He is with us. It makes it hard to understand why he calls Himself “Emmanuel.” Especially at night when I cry alone and go to bed alone, and each morning when I wake up alone and face another day without Rob. 

Alone is such a lonely word.

The holidays seem to amplify the problem, underscored as they are by their focus on togetherness and family and memories. This was my second Christmas without Rob. There’s a lot of attention given to all the “firsts” when your husband dies. By the time a year has gone by, so have several dozen "firsts" it seems. It's a lot to deal with. Surviving it feels significant. But once it was over, to my surprise, Round Two arrived and I realized I had to do it all again. And again.

And again.

This Christmas I was in my own house and needed a house-sized tree. I bought a fake one that was pre-lit, wrestled it into submission in the living room (something Rob always did) and, after all that bravery, I was reduced to a pile of tears by the thought of pulling out all the decorations safely hidden away in storage. Where they could not hurt my broken heart. Unless it is Christmas, and you don’t have anything else to hang on tree branches.

So, I turned my back on all of them, drove myself to Walmart, bought enough silver and blue baubles to color coordinate with my newly decorated great room, and hurried home to adorn my new tree. And when it was finished, I sat down on the sofa and burst into tears again. This was my tree? The one with mass produced decorations that made it look like it belonged in a hotel lobby? And where were the stockings? Not hung by the chimney with care, I can tell you that right now. I don’t even have a chimney anymore. Though I have a fake fireplace that I enjoy every single day, I could not bring myself to purchase a Christmas stocking that no one would fill for me. And I could not bear the thought of hanging it up all by itself, devoid of one for Rob.

So, I didn’t.

Surrendering to the paradox of comforting, painful memories, I tried anyway to retrieve our ornaments from storage, but they’re all hidden behind heavy boxes of books, and I couldn’t reach them. So, the tree remained adorned with brand new ornaments and I grudgingly adapted. I fell in love with gnomes, bought a few, and set their amusing, wintery figures around for decoration. Throughout it all, I ignored the glaring absence of my very favorite part of Christmas—the stockings.

I told myself it didn’t matter every time I saw a display of them in department stores. Stockings are for children, not sixty-four-year-old women who need to face reality. I barely had space for a fake tree. Where was I supposed to hang a foot-long pouch that would surely make me cry every time I looked at it? Nowhere, that’s where. This is your life now, I reminded myself. Get a grip and be thankful for what you do have. After all, lots of women have husbands who never fill their stockings or even buy them presents. You’re just late to the party.

One night, a few days before Christmas, my dear friend, Sue, and I had supper together and drove around looking at lights and talking. There are a few people in the world who offer their therapy services for free—hair dressers, nail techs, and best friends. Soon, my Christmas heartache was spilling out all over the inside of her car and she was handing me Kleenex to soak up the mess. I told her how I couldn’t face Rob's and my years of collected ornaments, and how I didn’t even try to hang up my lone stocking, or replace it. “Who would fill it?” I said.

After a few minutes, Sue said something I will never forget. “Oh, Eula,” she began, “I feel so bad. A few days ago the Lord told me to buy and fill a stocking for you. But I was in a rush that day and it was a strange impulse, so I let the idea go by.”

She apologized but, of course, there was no need for an apology at all, and I assured her of that. Actually, my heart lit up with her surprising confession. “I don’t need a stocking,” I told her. “I can’t believe God told you to do that. He saw me, Sue! I can’t believe that He saw me. Every time I walked past a display of Christmas stockings reminding me of my loss, He saw me. I never told anyone about this. Never mentioned to anybody how important stockings are to me. Only Rob knew that. But God saw it and it mattered to Him and He told you to do that. That's more important to me than if you’d done it.”

Well, Sue has a gift of giving. She loves to give, just like Someone Else I know. And when I came home from a Christmas Eve spent with my daughter and her family, a beautiful and stuffed full stocking with my name on it sat beneath my Christmas tree, snuck in while I was away. It was perfect. And when I emptied it the next morning and hung it on the wall beside the tree, it looked like it belonged there.

I listened to some Christmas sermons from my son’s church during Advent this year where they talked about Jesus, Emmanuel, God With Us. And I was right—it’s not Biblical for God to appear at your dining room table in person. The closest He's come to doing that was in the form of His Son, Jesus. But how did He communicate with people before Jesus came? He sent messages through prophets, angels, dreams. And I realized, no matter how angry and frustrated I am by the Silence of God, He is not silent. He shows up, usually in the form of other people. People who listen to Him and then do or say things that don’t always make sense at first. At least, not until someone else gives them the translation.

We are the Body of Christ. We are His hands. We are his feet. We are his voice. We are even His wallet. And learning to listen and then speak His language to hurting hearts is what brings heaven to earth every day of the year.

Emmanuel is with us.

Silence

The leaves are falling to the ground right along with the rain on this wet New Year’s Sunday morning. My favorite kind of day, and it’s supposed to be like this until tomorrow. Maybe. It’s like this right now and I’m here to enjoy it. That always needs to be good enough. What’s here. Right now. Fleeting as “now” is.

Katy’s huge ash trees are in various stages of undress as I stand here, gazing across her pasture. The big one off my patio has lost nearly every leaf thanks to recent storms. The granddaddy of them all, which shelters the kids’ rope swing and trampoline, seems more modest, perhaps prolonging it’s own personal “fall” until February when the new 2023 crop of determined sprouts pushes the old out of the way so they can strut their stuff.

At the back of the pasture, another giant stands totally barren. The normally camouflaged treehouse where Will plays with his cousins is perched among the expansive arms of this third, darkened ash. A vagrant yellow leaf wouldn’t dare hang around this old man where he hovers protectively above children’s playgrounds and a nearly empty chicken coop. I’ve never heard of a haunted ash tree, but this one may have posed for the artistic pen of Tim Burton.

Listening to the raindrops fall while I hold my hot mug of cocoa, a long-ago memory surfaces, as they do so often now. A couple of newlyweds of maybe two years, Rob and I lived in the land of rainstorms where his family set down their own roots generations ago. He loved the rain just as much as I, but there was never enough of it. And because of that, we owned an audio recording of thunderstorms that I played any time I needed to create the cozy setting which has always brought me comfort.

There are so many things, unfortunately, that Grief stirs up in my mind now, and the domino effect is always staggering. For example, there is a massive silence that encapsulates my home, emphasizing how much I miss the sound of my husband’s wonderful voice and, on days like this one, even the chaotic noise of televised football games. They were always coupled with the scent I still associate with Rob—his beloved cup of coffee. Out of the blue, triggered by things I can’t recall later, there are frequent reminders of the life we built together and how loved he made me feel. Like the stealthy way he used to walk up behind me and wrap his arms around me. And, just like that, overwhelmed by the memory and what I've lost, I nearly crumble to the floor in aching sorrow.

How do you go on when half of you has been amputated?

There’s another silence that has appeared, nearly in sync with Rob’s absence, and it feels like absence, too. The silence of God.

This one is the most difficult element in the journey of Grief, for it is a journey. A “slog” my counselor reminds me. I had hoped that Rob and I would continue to beat the odds in a culture where nearly half of all marriages fail, by reaching that golden anniversary goal and sailing past it “to infinity and beyond.” Or at least until we both had contracted dementia and simply didn’t recognize each other anymore. We were well on our way. But we were not in control. It makes me wonder who really is. Which is the stuff of theological debates between people who have no idea either.

Until I lived here, in the Land Of No Answers, I had theories, too, about who is really in control. I had opinions about God’s will. Definitions for faith. Explanations for the broken hearted, believing that my uninjured heart could lend clarity and clear up all confusion. Now, while I have experience, I still have no answers. All I have is silence.

I think it’s safe to say that God rarely explains Himself. Perhaps there is a sort of pirate’s map out there somewhere detailing my life’s journey where ‘X’ marks the spot and a treasure trove of revelation is buried. But we all know how difficult it is to interpret something like that, drawn up as they usually are by a less than artistic hand, with all the important details either written in code or ripped away by hostile opponents who got to it first.

That may be the first time anyone has ever compared God to a pirate. No offense intended. I’m just trying to figure out why we can only hold onto this moment’s falling rain and are unable to prevent it from escaping from between our fingers.

Silence. The silence of God. C.S. Lewis wrote about it in his private journals, later published under a pseudonym and entitled, "A Grief Observed.”

“When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be—or so it feels—welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become. There are no lights in the windows. It might be an empty house. Was it ever inhabited? It seemed so once. And that seeming was as strong as this. What can this mean? Why is He so present a commander in our time of prosperity and so very absent a help in time of trouble?”

If life were actually a Greek production with every act orchestrated, this would be the cue for Job’s Friends, his comforters, to slip in from stage left, detailing to one of the most brilliant minds and Christian apologists of all time why it was necessary for his beloved wife, Joy, to die and leave him brokenhearted, while they themselves exited stage right and continued their journey home to a dinner table set for two.

Even God doesn’t explain why He is so often silent in our pain.

The closest we can come, although I am neither an apologist or a Bible scholar but only an actor in that Greek production, is to listen to the words of Jesus, struggling to breathe, while hanging on a Roman cross, “Why have You forsaken me?”

Because that’s what it feels like when your world has been shattered. Perhaps the concussion has temporarily deafened us. The blinding pain leaves us in the dark begging for any light. The sense of isolation is suffocating, for no one else will ever feel what you feel in your worst moment. It’s impossible, no matter how hard they may try. Your feelings belong to you. And even Jesus felt, in His worst moment, like He had been abandoned by His God.

But He wasn’t. Because “God was in Christ Jesus reconciling the world to Himself.” His Father was there, the Comforter Holy Spirit was there, the three of them, God in One, all suffered together on that cross.

It only felt to Jesus like He was alone. Which is suffering enough.

Across the pasture, taking in the expanse of that stand-in tree for Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, a black bird hangs onto a barren branch, somehow uncaring that there are no leaves there to protect it from the rain. It seems to me while I ponder this view that, in the long of winter, a tree loses its purpose. It offers no shade. No umbrella canopy for lesser creatures. No barrier from the sun’s intensity. No shelter for the weary.

And yet.

The bird disagrees. Despite the other trees in my daughter’s back pasture with their varying degrees of leafdom, this blackbird chooses to perch in what could be misinterpreted as a dead and useless tree. Is the question whether the grackle prefers a high spot unencumbered by the interference of foliage? Can its enemies be located faster when the view is unhampered?

Or maybe the point is that a majestic tree, stripped of its vibrancy, is merely resting. The roots still run deep, nurtured by good soil and frequent rain. But it is not green. Instead, it is waiting. Pausing in the silence of unseen growth. Fully aware of the hope that spring will come.

And with it, life.