WHO AM I?

I’ve had a rather difficult week this week.  My thoughts, although I bribe them with shopping and eating, seem to keep returning to the afternoon my husband passed. It could be that we would have shared our 28th anniversary this week or that it’s simply the part of the grieving process.  So, I accept these thoughts, cry and continue on.  But the particular memory that both haunts and comforts me is the hushed stillness that came upon his thin, pale, almost unrecognizable face, the instant after he drew his last breath.    

“He’s with the Lord Mom”, my son said. And I silently gasped. The horror of death had given way to victory for Dan but had thrown me instantly into a world of widowhood, kicking and screaming, mind you, but in that world nonetheless.  At that exact moment, and for just a moment, standing beside the body of the man with whom I had spent 28 years and the friend I loved dearly, I had never felt such a deep, almost indescribable loneliness, an emptiness that was so dark that it swallowed the short lived relief that I felt that he was no longer in pain.  Who I had been was no longer.

In one way or another, there will be a time, if even briefly, that most women will feel an emptiness within themselves, a loneliness that defines all other loneliness - whether its menopause, death of a spouse, a divorce, empty nest or just a hormonal rage that offsets the tsunami in Thailand, we may struggle for purpose.   I think some men have the right idea about a mid-life crisis - purchase a new Ford Mustang, get a few hair plugs and be done with it.  Meanwhile, we women are enduring our “loss of selves” by  tolerating hormonal overload, plucking chin hairs that grow like crabgrass, "girdling up” just to go to the grocery store and attempting to defy gravity with forms of elastic and fabric known only to the black market.  It’s horrendous! And all of this on top of trying to figure out our place in life during those few sane moments when we aren’t in tears.   

However, when everything that has defined who you are has been pulled from beneath you, there is a sudden realization that what defined you to begin with was only the mercy of God.  Through these past months I've had to begin the process of rediscovering who I am and I have come to know that it can't be done without the Lord.  My significance lies strictly in Him and His Word and although I’ve had head knowledge of that for years, I had never identified with that fact until the moment my hand was in Dan’s for the very last time on this earth, that moment when it was just me and God and His truth.  

 

When the "empty" time comes and the worthless mounds of chocolate has left us, once again, zitty and bloated, and still void of purpose, cry out to the One who created you with a grand purpose in mind.  It's most difficult to sit back and allow Him to work, but necessary.  "For it is God who works in you to will and to act in order to fulfill his good purpose. (Philippians 2:13) and "I will cry out to God Most High, To God who performs all things for me.(Psalms 57:2),  and as He promises, He will do. 

 

Who knows??? Maybe my life long desire to become a ballerina is in my future after all! :)

 

~Joy Dilts