Finding Love's Roots through Grief {Guest Post :: Annie}

Oh, yay, it's time for Annie! That's the name of my truly lovely friend that I get to introduce you to today. She and I {also} met at Relevant last October, the very first night. In fact we met in the lobby with a conglomeration of newbies before the conference even began, and somehow over the next 24 hours, gravity seemed to continuously draw us back to each other. By the time we were all leaving on Sunday, less than 48 hours after we first met, discovering her and Cara was seriously like finding missing puzzle pieces that just helped to complete the picture, in the words of Anne of Green Gables, kindred spirits FOR SURE. Being an ENFP like my sister, knowing Annie is like knowing someone that I have known my whole life. She is smart and funny and wise and quirky and artsy and deep and loving all in one package. Annie makes her home with her love, Ted and their two beautiful princesses. When she isn't busy being a wife and mom, you can find Annie's poetic prose at Annie at Home, where she share her heart as a parent, her artistic ventures, and most of all, how all of that spurs her on in her journey with Jesus. You also MUST check out Annie's latest venture where she conceptualized and created the entire art decor for a local cafe. It's amazing!

Finding Love's Roots through Grief

Relentless love can mean a lot of things. There's a deep mercy in a heart rescued, and sweet mercy, too, in the protection from the shackles in the first place.

And I grew up in sunshine and sweet places, and His love pursued me: in wind whipping straight through my soul as we raced bikes down to the farm, in soul friends who knew my heart and loved me anyway, in a million little nothings that reverberated with goodness, whose sweet music drowned out the flat notes and off keys.

And I have felt heartache and wrestled with God over injustice, His existence, and all the blurry lines that a legalist detests. And over and over, He has quieted me with His love.

But it wasn't until my sister died, tragically, that my real unraveling began. It's been two years now, and it's finally sinking in that I will never know the hows and whys of her last moments, only the date her body was discovered, and the finality of her death.

And how do you tell a story that's missing half the ending? How can the beauty and tragedy of such a complicated life be captured in simple lines of letters and sentence structure? Even now, I cannot do it.

But I can speak of the falling apart that happened at the very center of my heart. It was my own voice that taunted me. All those words and lessons and heart-cries about the God who is always about the work of making new, restoring and redeeming: they blew up in my face.

Because death is pretty final, and there was no redemption story here. And that grated against all my understanding, my deepest hope, the very foundation I'd laid my life upon.

And I made it through the cruel words of well-meaning folks and I made it through the eulogy, and I spoke the truth that seemed to mock me: I said it through tears, that her life was complicated, but Jesus' relentless love for her was constant. And I longed to believe.

But I spent every night for I don't know how long, slipping out of bed, so my husband could sleep, only to wake him with my uncontrollable sobbing. And we moved closer to home a few months later, a plan in the works before any of this unfolded, and I, the raging extrovert who couldn't have enough people in my life, I cocooned.

Those months were the darkest in my life. Quiet, full of silent ache. I kept it bottled up inside, until I couldn't keep it up, couldn't stand the tension of a heart desperately clinging to hope in a God who redeems, and mocking itself for doing so at the same time.

I was curled in a ball in the corner of the upstairs bathroom the night I caved. When I admitted I just couldn't work it out, that her death and the ache that now lived inside of me was too much to reconcile, I thought my world would split apart.

But, friends, the opposite happened. Not in that moment, and not by any certain magical formula. But months later, I would sit, weeping again, always the tears, and tell a friend how the very redemption that I had shaken my hand at heaven and demanded, a glimmer of that redemption was unfurling right in the midst of my brokenness. The words shocked me as they rolled off my tongue, and rung true to my core.

In her death, my sister gave me the gift of a faith shaken, and the slow awakening to a God bigger than my ability to comprehend, full of mystery, and there is rest in simply knowing the One who knows the unknowable. Her death, and my inability to handle it, revealed broken places that He yearned to heal, parts of myself I did not know had died, and the opportunity for new life after years of dormancy.

And I do not pretend to understand the ways this all weaves together. I do not believe we can draw simple cause and effect lines to understand the complexity of loss, and I despise the simple answers offered to squelch grief: "Maybe she died so that..." But I do believe that a thousand things can happen in just one thing. And know in my heart of hearts, that God's relentless love, it has wrapped its roots deeper into my soul.

And there is an undercurrent to all this sunshine and heartache, and it is His constant pulsing heartbeat for His glory being revealed and the beautiful redemption is unfolding even now...

... even when our circumstances scream raw in defiance to His goodness

... especially in our brokenness

... beautifully in the mended places.

This month I have asked some of my fellow bloggers to join me here at The Little Missionary Girl All Grown Up to share how they have seen the Relentless Love of the Father in their lives in moments of brokenness, heartache, and valley-of-shadow moments. This post is the 9th in the series of that exploration into the passion of the Father for us across miles, across personalities, across hearts that are His. To read more of the posts, click here and here.