Changed

It changed in a day. It's funny how life does that. You have plans, you see life headed in a general direction, assume it will continue and make plans according.  Then everything changes…

 Life changed completely and dramatically 18 months ago. 18 months ago on a Sunday afternoon I went for a hike on a beautiful sunny winter afternoon. Alone in my thoughts, contemplating the future and thankful for the journey. Everything changed on Monday, but I had no way of knowing at the time just how much!!

These last 18 months have been full of change. I was trying to describe that to someone not too long ago and the best I could come up with was that I felt like everything, and I do mean everything, in my life was turned upside down and tossed into a bucket. The bucket was shifted and mixed around, then dumped back out again. Since then it's being slowly rebuilt piece by piece. As I was thinking about that analogy, I remembered a movie that the boys watched a lot when they were little, called The Iron Giant. At the end of the movie to save his friend, Hogarth, the Iron Giant flies high up into the atmosphere to intercede a missile that threatens the town. The giant robot is blown apart and spread across the globe. Earlier in the movie, when the Iron Giant is injured, a beacon sounds from within himself and the broken pieces are called back together; reassemble to make him whole again.  After he sacrificed himself, Hogarth finds a large screw that was once a piece of his friend and brings it home to have something to remember him by. The movie ends when suddenly, in a day, as Hogarth is getting ready for bed the beacon begins to sound and the bolt leaves him to make its way back to once again make whole the Iron Giant.  I always loved that movie.  It was one I didn't mind watching over and over again, as you know kids like to do. The hope and promise of broken things being made new and love and friendship enduring beyond seemingly impossible separation always made me feel warm and nostalgic. The hopeless romantic in me I guess.

18 months has nearly passed since Jake left.   The pieces of my shattered life, though not completely reformed have begun to align themselves again. People have moved in and out of my life through this season and I have been extremely blessed. Not everything has turned out the way I thought it might, but that does not in any way diminish their significance in my journey. 

One of our first grief counseling sessions the boys and I went to, the counselor tried to explain what we could expect over the course of our grief journey. She showed us a bell curve type graph with different emotions descending down to the bottom and returning again to the baseline. She explained that though that was a general guideline, most people jumped around a bit and had set backs at various stages. She also explained that though the first year was generally considered the most difficult, most people said it was actually the 18 month point that was the worst. I've since heard that from multiple people. Instinctively I think I knew that would be the case because the 6 month point falls in the same month as his birthday.  So as the month of July began I was anxious but also now prepared for what might be a hard month. 

But! True to fashion, ever the rule breaker, and despite missing him terribly I feel as though my "beacon" has been activated and the pieces of my shattered life are slowly being reassembled. The hope and promise of broken things being made new and love and friendship enduring beyond seemingly impossible separation have renewed that warm and nostalgic feeling. I feel Jake's presence with me mixed with the promises of God and the Holy Spirit. And even though I can't see him, I know that Jake is still intimately apart of our everyday lives, a quite observer of God's promises being made real in our lives.  I feel the light of his infectious smile and his joy of watching our journey with the perspective of eternity.  

I'll never, ever, ever stop missing him and I know there will still be days when the tears will flow, but my heart is full, joy and laughter have returned and I can't stop smiling....