Category Archives: Saying Goodbye

Letting Go, Part I

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Any mother who loves being a mom faces a bit of angst when it comes time to let her children go. The first really big “go” is off to college, a tough goodbye for most parents. But it helps to recognize we’ve been letting go in small ways during the 18 years leading up to that, each one a bit of training for the bigger go-moments.

The first small one is letting go of breastfeeding, followed soon by babies who grow into toddlers and prefer being on their own feet to being perched on our hips. Little by little they go – to the church nursery, preschool, kindergarten, summer camp. We find ourselves on the outside looking in, checking our little ones through one-way glass. They’ve gone into the room; we’re out in the hall.

Even as we clap for every new accomplishment, inside we’re struggling to keep a smidgen of sadness at bay. As time passes, our children go farther and farther from us, the natural order of things.

During the early years of letting-go’s, if our young ones object to being away from us, if they cry when we leave them, we get upset. But if they don’t mind going, that upsets us, too. Like it or not, each mini-going is a stepping stone to the biggest ones: moving into first apartments, getting married, relocating out-of-state, possibly out of the country.

Tonight I watched Birgitta go again. Because she’s having a good year at the University of Iowa, and because she’s had many “go’s” before today, our farewell wasn’t strained. Still, watching her drive away pushed me immediately into prayers of concern.

Last time she made this same drive (after Christmas break), a sudden snowstorm iced the roads till they became treacherous, and half way back to school she had a harrowing experience. Deep slush on the highway left only tire-track ruts to guide drivers, and visibility was poor. Her car fishtailed then began to swerve, ending in a full-circle spin. She came to a stop at the edge of the shoulder, other cars flying past her.

Incredibly, no one was hurt and no damage occurred. After taking a few minutes to collect herself, Birgitta cautiously finished her drive.

Today, as we looked out the window, the weather looked fine. But just to reassure her (and me), I said, “Let’s check weather.com before you go.”

The hour-by-hour chart showed a deteriorating forecast with the highlighted word “icy” in two of her five driving hours. Temperatures were exactly 32 degrees, that mysterious place of maybe-slippery-maybe-not. When we saw this, both of us sucked in air simultaneously like an unplanned duet. But she had to go anyway.

As she drove away, praying was the only way I could help. As I talked to God, he talked right back and said, “I know you’re thinking about Birgitta’s snowy spin-out. Some day I’ll explain exactly how I was involved in that, but for now, just know I was involved. You’re watching her go and you’re feeling helpless, but remember, I’m not just watching her, and I’m never helpless. Where she goes, I go.”

“You [Lord] are my hiding place; you will protect me from trouble and surround me with songs of deliverance.” (Psalm 32:7)

Switching Gears

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Going on a trip is exciting. Beginning with the inception of the idea through the loading of the suitcases, even the anticipation is fun. Then airport greetings and animated car conversations are full of promise for a good time together.

But backtracking our steps at the other end of a vacation isn’t nearly as inspiring. Although arriving home can be satisfying, the minute we step in the door, we hear the “have-to’s” of shifting gears. Even before we take off our coats, the pile of mail shouts for our attention. “Pay these bills! Respond to these letters! Look who needs you!” Exclamation points pounce on us from everywhere. Even the calendar hollers with the commitments we wrote on it the week before we left. “Get ready! Your appointments are coming right up!”

The refrigerator calls, too. “The milk is sour! Your strawberries are shriveled! Your sandwich meat is past its expiration date!”

Today as I came home, everywhere I looked I saw another exclamation point. “Unload the dishwasher! Unpack your suitcase! Do the laundry! Get organized for church tomorrow!”

It’s difficult to go from one reality to another, but life offers endless opportunities to practice shifting gears. When we were kids, our Septembers brought a shift in classrooms. College was a shift in our homes and lifestyles, marriage a shift from single to double. Parenthood forced major gear-shifting, followed by empty nest shifts.

For me, widowhood has been the most traumatic shift I’ve been asked to make, a change the equivalent of unpacking after a thousand trips. But I believe God is especially close to us during each of our adjustments, small and large. That’s because he’s never had to gear-shift himself, not for any reason. He’s everywhere, always, in all capacities.

Scripture gives us a word picture to help us understand this, telling us God has no “shadow of turning,” a reference to our human shadows changing as the sun crosses the sky each day. Unlike us, the Lord is constant and sure, thus able to bring stability to the shifts we must make. After he’s helped us through, we can look back and say, “That wasn’t so bad.”

Today, with all the exclamation points of change poking at me for attention, I stood in the kitchen trying to figure out which one to tackle first. For no special reason I opened the utensil drawer where the odd-sized cooking tools were askew and absently began to rearrange things. Pretty soon the drawer contents were on the counter, and I was fingernail-scraping-off sticky old shelf paper.

Before I was finished, I’d hunted in the basement for plastic dividing bins and washed them, wiped out the drawer, put down new shelf paper, washed most of the utensils, set some aside for Good Will and completely revamped my former storage system. All the while my carry-on bag was still on the counter screaming, “Hey! Unpack me!”

But God, as creative as always, simply said, “Before you do anything else, let’s bring order to this chaotic drawer. When you’ve corrected that mess, the rest of your gear-shifting chores will be easy.”

And he was right.

“The Father… does not change like shifting shadows.” (James 1:17)

Fire-builder

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Nelson has always loved fire. I remember catching him lighting matches in his upstairs bedroom when he was about eight. “What on earth are you doing?” I said, alarmed at the prospect of a fire in our very old, all-wooden house.

“I’m testing stuff,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“Seeing what burns and what doesn’t.”

He proceeded to tell me he’d cut a tuft of his hair, which burned “real good” in a bowl and had tried to melt a plastic truck, which was “no good.” When I saw a black smudge on the closet door, I asked if he’d tried to burn that, too.

“Yup,” he said, without emotion. “I couldn’t get it to go.”

My heart was pounding, but I tried to stay calm, suggesting his experiments might be better performed outdoors. Over the years he did a great deal of that, learning valuable lessons: fire crackers can explode before you’re ready, and all burns hurt.

Now, in his thirties, Nelson is a master fire-builder, and our old stone fireplace has had inviting fires in it every evening. He loves everything about fire-building, starting with finding dead wood in the forest and hauling it home. Sawing it into log-lengths then hand-splitting it with an ax is rewarding for him, and when the fire is aglow, it’s satisfying for the rest of us, too.

Tonight the fireplace is dark, because Nelson is five time zones away at the University of the Nations in Kona, Hawaii. He’s on his way to New Zealand where he’ll start with another group of YWAM students for 12 weeks of spiritual training followed by a three-month mission outreach.

Although Nelson made sure I had a big pile of ready-to-burn wood before he left, I haven’t made a fire. I don’t get the same kick he does out of arranging, lighting and coaxing a fire into full flame, but the real reason is that he’s not here to sit in front of it with me.

On a cold winter evening, a wood-burning fire invites people to gather for conversation. Sometimes a fire’s attraction is so strong, chairs get pulled into a semi-circle around the hearth, close enough to see firelight dancing on each face.

This winter we’ve shared many meals and scores of meaningful talks in front of Nelson’s fires, beginning last September. When the house was full of family, we’d look forward to baby bedtimes, then congregate in front of the fire with ice cream or brownies, enjoying loving camaraderie at the end of busy days.

But all 14 of them are gone now, and my quiet cottage has only me in it, which is OK. Tonight I’m especially missing Nelson, who was the last to leave, just yesterday. When I got home from the airport and found his touching thank you note on the kitchen counter, I bawled like a baby.

But he’s doing exactly what God called him to do, which brings me deep satisfaction. As a matter of fact, each of my kids and kids-in-law are right where the Lord wants them. Their determination to follow his direction “lights my fire.”

And I don’t even have to go to a cold woodpile to feel its glow.

“Love is as strong as death…  Love flashes like fire, the brightest kind of flame.” (Song of Solomon 8:6)