Sitting quietly, I listen with my ears and watch with my eyes, the eyes of my heart that is.  Eyes unlike my natural ones that are myopic with a touch of astigmatism causing an annoying blur when my contacts don’t settle just right. I listen and watch with my heart-eyes until I “see”. 

A mother lamenting the death of her child. This is not the way it’s supposed to be!

So much dark-water pain in her ocean blue eyes. Tidal pools formed in rocky coasts, filled with hard-shell creatures imprisoned in isolated depressions.  Living pain feeding upon trapped-water memories until they rise and spill over in tears. 

Morning and evening tides of pain.  Patterning, rhythmically, methodically – in and out, ebb and flow, always moving.

Both King Solomon and Bob Seeger remind me, “For everything there is a season”.  Yet today I question … does the season of weeping over the death of a child ever really end?

While the pain may lessen as time goes on, the impact of the loss seems to me to linger on and on, season after season.

I hear the mother’s lament once again, lingering decades beyond her precious child’s parting.  And with it I hear all the aching voices I have known, including my own, that still weep from time to time.

Yet in the moment I’m reminded that in every lament there’s a latent hope: God hears, and God cares.

We ride the waves of grief—up & down, down & up—until eventually, somehow, we land upon solid ground.  Ground that takes us in—womb-like—and protects.  The solid rock of trust in God when there are no answers to the hard questions. 

Love & Peace.