Category Archives: Widowhood

A Shining Star

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While running errands today, I got off at the wrong expressway exit, then turned the opposite way of the store. And I forgot to buy what I went to get, because I’d left my list at home.

At the pharmacy drive-through, the girl behind the glass said, “$8.15.” I put $8.00 in the drawer with a dime and nickel, but she immediately slid it back out to me. “That was a penny,” she said. I took the penny and substituted a nickel, but the drawer came out again. “Either send me a dime or another nickel.”

Simple tasks have gotten complicated, but this is my new reality, and whining about it won’t help. Besides, I’m not the only one struggling to adjust. This week I met another widow whose husband passed away just before Nate. Without even a minute’s warning, her Phillip died at their breakfast table. Rhea is only 23 years old and gave birth to a daughter one month after her husband’s death.

But there’s more. Baby Sandra arrived with major health issues that include frequent races to the emergency room, yet her mommy, the new widow, smiles and talks of God’s lavish blessing over these last months. After hearing her story, I was speechless.  My organizational blips are a pitiful excuse for complaining. If I had to step into this young girl’s shoes, I’d crumble. Yet she’s a sparkling example of taking God at his word when he said, “I’ll provide for you.”

Rhea leans on the Lord every day with the full weight of her complicated situation and has unshakable confidence he’ll continue to meet her needs indefinitely. She and her husband served together in Kenya, establishing homes for orphans. And because little Sandra’s recent surgery was successful, the two of them will soon return there.

For most of us there’s a huge gap between shouldering the burdens we’ve been asked to carry and our willingness to seek God’s help. In that gap of complete helplessness, we try to help ourselves, a ludicrous approach to our problems.

But the greater problem is setting God aside and using him as a last-resort solution. Self-sufficiency, esteemed in our society, is always a bust next to the way God wants to do things. His offer is to co-shoulder our burdens and sometimes obliterate them completely. By trying to do things our way, we not only risk making a mess but forfeit the supernatural blessing and unexpected joy Rhea is now experiencing. We also throw away a golden opportunity to give God credit for the amazing things that happen to us and around us when we abandon ourselves to him.

I asked Rhea if she has clung to any specific Scripture passage during these challenging months since Phillip died. Her surprising answer came quickly:

“Do everything without grumbling or arguing, so that you may become blameless and pure, children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation. Then you will shine among them like stars in the sky.” (Philippians 2:14-15)

Rhea is shining brightly!

A Day for Sweethearts

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Today has been a pensive day. Maybe that’s because it’s Sunday, always the most difficult day of the week for missing Nate. Maybe it’s the approach of Valentine’s Day. Maybe both.

What good is Valentines Day without your one-and-only? Nate loved pampering me and never arrived at February 14 without a gift, chocolates, flowers, maybe a heart necklace. He always did a good job of making me feel loved.

This afternoon as I got teary, I put Nate’s wedding ring on a heart necklace and asked Jack if he wanted to go for a walk. The 54 degree weather was working on neighborhood snow drifts, and the air felt like spring. We hiked to the beach, a feast for the eyes in any kind of weather.

 

As the two of us surveyed the shoreline from the dune, appreciating the mountains of ice and deep drifts of snow, God gave me an idea to do something I haven’t done in my 65 years: make a beach snowman. Warm weather and dense snow made for perfect packing, and my three snowballs were rolled in no time. Because of wild winds, part of the sand had been scoured clean of snow, exposing smooth beach stones just right for snowman features and buttons. A bit of dried dune grass flew by, ideal for hair. I felt like a kid who’d gone out to play, and the sadness of the afternoon lifted.

As we left the beach, I remembered a Valentines Day snowman-extravaganza we orchestrated in the late ‘80’s. Mary and I, with the 12 children we then had, drove to our folks’ home in Wilmette well past the kids’ bedtimes. Our mission was to build snow people representing each of them, including props of their choice. We hoped to line them up on the front lawn facing Mom and Dad’s kitchen window. When they raised the shade on Valentines morning, they’d see 13 snowmen (one for my brother’s baby, too) looking back at them.

The kids got into the furtive nature of our special gift, keeping their voices low as they worked, the older ones helping the younger. When Dad surprised us all by driving around the corner and sweeping the yard with his headlights, they all dove for the ground.

After the snowmen were assembled, we propped up a big red sign that said, “Happy Valentines Day!” and sped away, successfully undetected. The surprise had the impact we’d hoped, and eventually the fun grew to include a couple of school field trips and one newspaper article, complete with photo. Long after spring had arrived, Mom and Dad were still talking about their 13 snow-kids.

This afternoon as the sun was setting, Jack and I walked home from the beach, concluding that Valentines Day isn’t only about sweethearts. God was sweet to me today, showing his love by putting an end to my grey mood with a simple white snowman.

 

“I will be glad and rejoice in your love, for you saw my affliction and knew the anguish of my soul. I trust in you, Lord; I say, ‘You are my God.’ My times are in your hands.” (Psalm 31:7,14,15)

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)