At 46 years of age, I felt like an orphan. I was an orphan. My greatest advocates, my most avid supporters – the two people who brought me into the world and infused me with their unique combination of unconditional love and hard-line accountability, were gone. And I found myself wondering what I was still doing here. Despite all I had to live for, I began asking why God didn’t take me, too. Why couldn’t I just close my eyes and not wake up? Why couldn’t I reunite with my parents and rest in His glory like they did?
I knew this was not what either Mom or Dad would want for me, but this loss, this jagged hole in my heart, sometimes seemed too great an injury to overcome.
Ever since I was a little girl, I held fast to a dream of writing for a living. And I’m doing it in a sense, developing training modules and supporting others in their culture change journey within our healthcare organization. But what about the stories and novels I had envisioned? Despite writer’s conferences, the retaining of a consultant, and the professional editing of one of my manuscripts, my name has not yet made it onto the cover of a book. I questioned putting this dream to bed. Maybe I just didn’t have it. Maybe the words I scribed didn’t inspire the soul, spark the spirit, or engage the mind like I had hoped. And then Christmas came.
Those siblings who could make it, met at my brother’s house for a day of celebration on December 26. As always, we laughed and carried on until our cheeks hurt and our sides ached. Nearer the end of our time together, my brother said he had a bag of possessions from Mom and Dad, not anything of monetary significance, but things he thought we might want to go through; we might take what suitable keepsakes we found there. “There’s a letter in there from one of you – it’s just signed, ‘Me.’” I needed no further encouragement to sift through the contents. The letter was dated May 25, 1995, written by me and enclosed in a card I had sent my dad for his impending 65th birthday. In it, I reflected on his hands, how they had seemed so big to me as a child, how they had lost strength and stamina through the years but how his heart was still, “pure gold,” as strong in his love for the Lord and his family as ever. Sixteen years had passed since I penned those words. Dad carried them in his wallet until the day he died.
How could I dare question my ability to write any further? If I never touched another soul, I knew I had touched my father. I touched my father. And my father touched me. He sent me a gift from the grave, the encouragement I needed to pen this post, with many more to come.
Enjoy your day. Enjoy this blog.
