One Year Ago Today

Weep then at the death of a dear one as if you were bidding farewell to one setting out on a journey. 
- St. John Chrysotom 

One year ago today, I got up at the usual time (5am), made a cup of coffee, began reading, journalling and eventually got around to writing one of these daily devotions.  

I concluded the devotion that day with this:  

If you are worrying today, pray that God will cover your worry with his peace.  If you are fretting over the future, ask God to give you the crazy-awesome peace that doesn't make any sense.  And then simply be still and know that God is God and you are not. 

Not even thirty minutes after I wrote that line, my dad came out of his bedroom and told me that he couldn't get my mom to respond to him.  

I went into where she was lying on their bed and called out to her.  Her eyes focused on me for a moment, and she smiled through them brightly for a second, raising her eyebrows to me like she always did when she saw me.  

And then she was gone--she slipped into a coma and never really came back to us.  She passed away the next day.  

Until today, I have never re-read the devotion that I wrote that morning.  Reading those words today was a revelation, though.  In a strange way, you might say that I wrote them for my future self to read one year later, just when I needed them.    

It's been a year since my mom passed, and I am just now beginning to feel that crazy-awesome peace that I wrote about then--the kind of peace that doesn't make any sense, the kind of peace that can only come from a Divine source.   

What I've learned this past year is that you can feel both loss and hope in the same moment.  I've learned that the only way to get past grief is to travel through it.  I've learned that I'm not enough on my own and that I need loving people in my life to fill in the spaces I leave blank. 

I've also learned that there's only one true source of lasting peace and it's not me.  

Beloved, whatever hardship or challenge you might be facing today isn't bigger than the One who loves you beyond all love, and who longs for you to find the peace that can only come from fully trusting and surrendering to the perfect and joyful Divine will.  

May the grace and peace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you now and always. Amen.