thoughts from here and now

I have a friend I grew up with who has been diagnosed with ALS.

'Okay.' you say, as you wonder where I am going with this. It's been so long since I've posted anything, you wonder what has brought me out of hiding to post this now.

You see my friend lost her father to the same disease while we were still very young. While her family of seven children still had need of a father in their lives. I remember him well as he was the janitor at my school and whenever we went as a class to another area of the school he would single me out of the line to tug at my long hair and say 'hi Susie.' I don't know why that made me feel special but it did. It still makes me smile.

A few years ago that same family lost one of the brothers, also a friend of mine, to a brain tumor. He lived well beyond the years that the doctors had given him. Long enough to repent of the lifestyle that he had chosen in the 'lost years' between, between the death of his father and the diagnosis that changed his life, and eventually ended it. I had a dream about him on the night that he left this earth to be reunited with both his earthly father and his heavenly One. In my dream I was talking to his mother and asking where Brian was because I had heard great news that he had been healed. She pointed over to another area of the place that we were in, which I realized later was the church that I had grown up in. There he was chatting away to some others, full of excitement and joy. Then I woke up. I knew he had gone to be with the Lord, healed in a sense much more profoundly than the healing that he would have found here in his body. Healed in his spirit. A phone call in the morning from a mutual friend confirmed this.

Can you imagine being the mom in this family? I can't. How does a woman hold up under these burdens? To first loose her husband, then a son, and now the potential loss of a daughter. It's unimaginable, isn't it.

It makes my burdens seem light in comparison.

I know when I think about how she has managed that I have to come back to the presence of God in her life, and in the lives of her children. I know that I even envy that, when I look from here where I am, into the life that she bears. I envy the community of family that she had, and still has. The community that was modeled by herself and her husband before he passed, and that I see now in my friends life and marriage, being modeled to her children, and to me.

I have a hope to one day have that kind of community. First with God and a husband, and with children and grandchildren. It seems so impossible to me; not for lack of trying. I wonder why God has held it back from me and I wonder what kind of suffering I am willing to take on to find it.

I'm having an emotional day as I contemplate my own losses and know that I have not suffered nearly as much as others. In the absence of a 'community' to share that with, I come here to say what's on my heart.