I nearly collapsed, when I turned to see giant chocolate bars lining an end isle.
It was a casual grocery store stroll, just me and my husband. We were looking for piniatta’s for our daughter’s fourth and fifth birthdays.
They were born three days and one year apart. Who would guess when we were fifty, we would delight so, in our two Preschoolers?
Or that we would run circles around our twenty-year-old selves, accomplishing far more than what people expected of us in our middle ages.
And I wonder, is there this lie of limitation? This notion and almost handicap attached to specific people, based on age and expectations?
Ceilings on people because they come from some structure or live in such a season generalized to be a certain way…
And so, they can’t get passed societal norms, labels and ceilings, mental walls put on them unnecessarily?
I read a lot about trauma. The trauma that every book on adoption says my four adopted daughter’s should be frozen with, hindered by, paralized in.
Yet, I see the world’s lowered ceilings. One by one, the truth of love and limitless thinking crashes through expectations society promised.
There are no ceilings to love. Love is completely limitless.
There is nothing stopping the wide open thinking of a heart full of love, and no shelter that can keep them from stretching into their God-given call despite what they have been through.
And yet, this day, I see the large chocolate bars painting the end isle, and the crushing grief of loving my dad paralizes me, keeps me, frozen in time.
I have a ceiling. It is called grief. It is clear, so most days I don’t see it. Yet, it robs me and clenches me, because life often entangles us, when we least expect it.
Love is weighty, and the consequences of surrendering fully to another human being means they take that love and leave us with pain when they are gone.
We are captive to the memories, be it a foster child leaving, someone we love abandoning us, or a loved one passing, expected or suddenly.
And what “hard” is, is very much a reminder to us, that we are not in control.
The world is not ours to manipulate with time and good counseling, self-help books and mind strategies that walk us through unbarrable impossibilities…
Life is a surrender to the waves. It is a melting into the path God has layed out for us. It is a waiting and resting IN His goodness laced within even difficult circumstances.
We either own this life or let God lead us. We either rage against the injustice of it all or we bow to our Heavenly Father and give Him control of things we don’t understand.
And yet, when we control, a ceiling gets placed on us. Grief has walls and sharp edges. It limits us in our thinking and ability to function day to day.
Yet, in the surrender we are free.
Arms wide out open to experience the morning breeze, the gusting winds, and the torrent, with grace, as He carries us from season to season.
We stop becoming in charge. We stop trying to be saviors. And we give up and let go and become captive unto another and the wild seas and endless skies stop becoming a playground for our feelings.
And we shatter all the walls placed on us in expectation.
We wipe the slate of our minds and let grace into our own individual stories.
We give over the paper and give God the pen to write on us with grief or sorrow, unexplanable joy or endless love that melts to the core of
our being. Knowing…
He will never let us go.
We are whole the moment we see the chocolate candy bars and melt into that spot of being a little girl, ages 8, walking to 7-11 to buy the dad who just passed, his first candy bar for Christmas.
And then, we are free, to explore every past Christmas, where pennies weren’t needed, and yet, we wrap ever so carefully that same chocolate bar with almonds, put it under the tree and write…
Love: Your Little Girl
Who says, death is the end to life? Could it be perhaps, just the beginning?
Who says, a few years of our life, can define us completely, can handicap us indefinitely…
Isn’t God bigger than a diagnosis? Than labels? Than grief that tries to swallow us in the isles of the grocery store, when we least expect it?
Who says we are limited, by age, by geography, in opportunties?
If God has planted us, doesn’t He have a purpose for us? If He has left us here, didn’t He already make a way and create a destiny for us that only we can fulfill?
If life is limited, why do so many supercede the unexpected? Leap past the lame walls put around them? Climb over so tenaciously the condemning words labeled on them by others who don’t understand?
Isn’t faith wild and beyond what even we could imagine?
If we could do life independently then why would we call it faith? Why would we need a savior? How might we believe in the impossible when things don’t go our way.
The isle in the grocery store almost crippled me. But then, my mind shifted on the way home.
Maybe those candy bars, the same kind I used to buy my daddy as a little girl, before he died of cancer…Weren’t there to swallow me up with grief…
Perhaps, those candy bars were there to leave a crumb of hope. A reflection of me growing. A little taste of the piece of my dad that is still with me…
Despite time and space and earthly veils keeping us apart.
Perhaps, my dad is still with me. And my children can dream the impossible, with nothing at all to stop them.
Could it be, we have enough…And despite the hard, we can dream and leap, rise and reach for everything God puts before us.
We are not handicapped. We are blessed, chosen, delighted in and expected to do great things.
This world can’t stop us. This world is not our home.
Perhaps it’s not what happens to us, but how we think about life that matters?
Will we let our thoughts cripple us?
Or will we rise, better, blessed because of the gift to get to experience breathe drifting in our lungs, and the hope of others surrounding us when we least expect it.
At minimum, can we go and be a blessing, despite how we feel, regardless of what we think.
We are here to give, stretch, live in faith. Not to be frozen or crippled by our feelings.
So, how about if we go out and walk, head held high, into this world. Believing fully, God has good in store for us. He is with us.
We don’t need to be in control. Or run from grief.
We just need to give up and surrender to the message, He is living through us.
And perhaps our brokennes is enough. We are enough…
Even in the isle of the grocery store when sorrow drops us to our knees.
