Monthly Archives: March 2013

THE BLESSING COMES BACK

31 Sunday Mar 2013

Posted by in challenges of motherhood, Parenting, the healing journey

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"Songs of Innocence"

A hand-colored illustration by William Blake to accompany his poem “Songs of Innocence,” published in 1789

(A Poem)

Naively, I thought that the innocent babe in my arms
would always be mine to hold.
The child who ran to me with an injured knee
was completely content to receive my comfort.
I thought that I had all the answers.
Now I cling to the memory of that window of time
when I was able to show you a mother’s
humble attempt at sharing love, values, and beliefs.

In your mind, you have closed childhood’s door. As a result,
you are a million miles away.
It seems as if I cannot reach you.
All my words bounce back to me,
like balls in a game.
Are you playing games with me now
that you are taller than me?
Your contemplative silence feels like a game to me.

In your adulthood, you have become someone else.
Who is this person, who stands before me?
I—who bore you, fed you, trained you—
shouldn’t I have some say?
But, here you stand before me; you are your own person.
And I must wonder: other than bringing you
into the world and helping you grow physically,
what role did I play?

The circumstances of your life moved you
many miles away.
I cannot hug you.
Every day I wonder: What are you doing?
Who are you meeting? Helping?
Where is your life taking you?
Did you think this through
when you let distance determine our destinies?
Do you, like me, reminisce about the good ole days when we
lived in sweet simplicity?

You stand before me; you are a fully-orbed individual.
Your thoughts are laid out for me
like building blocks of all that is noble and true.
Your heart pours out with rivers of love,
which are far greater than the stream
that was mine to give.
I am blessed beyond measure to be your mother.

~ Alice Cecil

(Note: The narrator is one of many mothers who knows God’s grace on her journey.)

What to do with Sadness ~ Maundy Thursday and Good Friday

28 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in confessing our need, emotional needs, God's healing love, the healing journey

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William Blake's Holy Thursday (1794)

William Blake’s Holy Thursday (1794)

“Holy Week” (the week before Easter when we remember the last, painful days of Jesus’ life) was not a term I grew up hearing a lot. In our family and church we celebrated the joy of Palm Sunday and the victory of Easter Sunday. But we didn’t have Maundy Thursday or Good Friday services. We often sang, “I serve a risen savior, He’s in the world today” and I’m thankful for that heritage. Yes, the cross was sung about and preached about as well. My preacher dad would call people to repentance and faith based on Jesus’ finished work on the cross. And all during the year we sang rousing hymns and gospel songs about the power of the cross and the blood. But Easter week was altogether a joyous experience of colored eggs, new dresses, choir songs, and the biggest church attendance of the year!

Mother directed the choir’s Easter Cantata that always had a song or two about the sadness and suffering leading up to Easter. But we didn’t dwell there long. At the same time, in our personal lives I think we didn’t really know what to do with the emotion of sadness. In those inexplicable moments when a weight of sadness came over you and threatened to smother you, what did you do? You smothered it back! Maybe you had “a good cry” in private then put on a brave face and smiled for the family, the world, and the church. That’s what I saw my mother do.

I’m thankful for the legacy she gave me of loving God, loving people, choosing to be an over-comer. And truly, “the joy of the Lord is our strength.” And that joy is a fountain that wells up from deep inside as a result of the presence and work of Christ in us through his Holy Spirit. But I have learned by experience—and from the saints of old—that that joy is greater and purer and fresher when we allow periodic remembrance and identification with the sadness and suffering of Passion Week. The very word “passion” means “suffering.” Over a decade ago Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, brought this truth to the fore. In the past twenty years liturgy and observance of the church calendar have come back into many churches, and I find this enriches my Christian faith and experience. For instance, observing Maundy Thursday and Good Friday helps me know what to do with times of sadness.

Holy Week reminds me that Jesus was “a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief” (Isaiah 53:3). In the Garden of Gethsemane he said, “My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow to the point of death” (Matthew 26:38). He experienced sadness and sorrow to the depths, for me.

Whatever the source of my sadness …

  • sorrow for my sins and the suffering they caused my Lord.
  • waves of grief and sadness over personal losses, such as losing my mother at a young age.
  • sadness in the face of the cruelties, tragedies, and injustices I see people oppressed by.

… during Holy Week I am reminded of what to do with this “weight of sorrow,” these tears: bring them to Jesus …

  • See him kneeling in the garden, overwhelmed with sorrow, in anguished prayer and sweating drops of blood.
  • See him enduring the cruelest injustice, ridicule, and inflicted pain.
  • See him hanging on the cross agonizing, bleeding, and dying, because of my sins.

I can allow my occasional sadness to help me identify with Jesus, the man of sorrows. Then, when the resurrected Lord wipes those tears from my eyes, what JOY!

It’s Not too Late to Forgive

21 Thursday Mar 2013

Posted by in confessing our need, leaving a legacy, letting go of anger, reconciliation, the healing journey

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Ardis and her dad

Ardis with her dad soon before his death

Like a scab ripped from the skin, my wound was exposed again. Why would I deliberately enter into that wound again? How could I think that it was really healed? A recent post, “I Forgive You,” by Catherine Lawton was the catalyst that prompted me to take another look. That, and the fact that I spent Holy Week last year caring for my 93-year-old father, sent my mind back to the months preceding his death.

Catherine’s post reminded me of how the words and actions of forgiveness were not something that was modeled to me when I was growing up. Tears weren’t allowed either. We were taught to ‘buck it up’ and move on. Reading that post took me back to the letter I had written my father a year before he died. My grief at that time was still fresh from my mother’s passing, and my healing was making me bold in things of the heart. After reading Catherine’s post I pulled out that year-old letter.

Re-reading the letter to my father brought the pain of the wound to the surface. Tears overcame me as I read the words I had penned to him about my inner healing. I knew he had worried about me in the past, concerned that I would develop mental illness like my mother. He had told me that he was ‘watching me’ for signs. So I wrote the letter to reassure him that I was okay.

I’ll share a part of the letter to hopefully inspire others to forgive their parents. I sent this letter with no expectations from him in return. I just wrote what I felt the Lord laid on my heart to tell him:

“I won’t know all God’s purposes until I am in Heaven, too. But here on this earth and in this time, I have received incredible healing and much peace…. That is what I want for you, Dad. I thought it was important for you to know that Mom forgave you [before she died]. I want you to know that I forgive you also. I know you did the best you could under the circumstances. Even if you do have regrets about any of these family things, I know that, as a Smith,* it would be incredibly difficult for you to admit it. We Smiths always think we are so right. I guess if I had one regret in my upbringing it would be that I didn’t learn how to forgive others and to say “I’m sorry.” Those words would’ve helped me let go of so much of my anger and resentments years ago…

“…It’s not too late for you, Dad. You can do this. You can release all your ‘rightness’ and no-regrets thinking to the Lord. You can leave this family with a legacy of forgiveness. I hope and pray the Lord will bless you and keep you in His love for all your remaining days.

“I love you.

“Ardis”

My father never mentioned this letter to me or anything that was in it, but my stepmother told me he read and re-read it many times. I believe it sank into his heart, bridged the distance between us, and eventually gave him the ability to go in peace. Risking his rejection and ridicule by expressing my heart was worth it.

How about you? Is there someone to whom you need to say “I forgive you” while there is still time?

~ Ardis A. Nelson

*Surname changed to protect family privacy.

Exaggerated Memories

13 Wednesday Mar 2013

Posted by in emotional needs, forgiving mom, Learning to appreciate Mom, losing mom too soon, the healing journey

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Lilies

In The Secret Life of Bees, the girl Lily deals with feelings of guilt, anger, and forsakenness after her mother’s death. At the end of the story she says:

“I keep my mother’s things on a special shelf in my room…. The feeling that they are holy objects is already starting to wear off…. In the photograph by my bed my mother is perpetually smiling on me. I guess I have forgiven us both, although sometimes in the night my dreams will take me back to the sadness, and I have to wake up and forgive us again.” (from The Secret Life of Bees, p. 301)

After a loved one dies we tend to idealize that person. In our minds we exaggerate their positive qualities and minimize—maybe for a while we even forget—their negative qualities. I knew a mother whose young son died in a Boy Scout hiking accident. Even after ten years she hadn’t moved anything in his bedroom. And no one else was allowed in there. That space, his things, and those memories were sacrosanct.

At the beginning of The Secret Life of Bees Lily treats the few things she has left that belonged to her mother as holy objects, buried secretly in a treasure box. By the end of the book Lily keeps these objects on a shelf like other possessions, and she is even beginning to let her friends touch them.

In the book, Motherless Daughters, author Hope Edelman says, “Like anger, idealization is a normal and useful early response to loss. Focusing on a mother’s good traits reaffirms the importance of her presence, and processing the happy side of a relationship is a gentle way to activate mourning. But every human relationship is affected by ambivalence, every mother an amalgam of the good and the bad” (p. 19). Ms. Edelman explains that if we are to mourn our mothers fully, we need to look back and “acknowledge the flip sides of perfection and love.” Otherwise we will be remembering our mothers as only half of what they were, and even ending up mourning a caricature, not the person who was your mother.

My mother died young, before I had matured in my understanding of her and ability to relate to her. I was stuck in my needy grief as long as I memorialized her in my mind as perfect, almost hallowed. Coming to remember, love, and appreciate my mother as a multi-faceted, even flawed woman (albeit one who loved a perfectly loving and holy God) has helped me move through the grief to a place where I can live and love much more freely.

~ Catherine Lawton

A Letter to my Mom

01 Friday Mar 2013

Posted by in God's healing love, Learning to appreciate Mom, leaving a legacy, mother wounds, show love by serving

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Ardis and her mother in the hospital

Ardis with her mother on the first trip she describes in her story, “Walking my Mother Home” in Journeys to Mother Love

Reading each of the stories in “Journeys to Mother Love” gave me a glimpse into the lives and pain of eight other women who have allowed Christ to bring healing into their hearts. I love reading stories like these because they impart hope and inspiration that each of us can connect with or apply to our lives.

One of my takeaways was from the story written by Verna Hills Simms, “Take Care of Your Mother.” I was touched by how she writes a letter to her deceased mother every year on her mother’s birthday. I thought it was a wonderful idea, and decided to do the same thing. With the anniversary of my mother’s passing a few weeks ago, I chose to do it in honor of that occasion.

Dear Mom,

It has been two years since the day the Lord took you home to be with Him. I still marvel how God perfectly orchestrated the events leading up to your death and the identity revelations He gave me as a result. I know you have been watching all of these things from above. I sense your overwhelming joy at how I have embraced the parts of me that mirror your personality and faith in the Lord.

After you passed away, it was hard for me to adapt and internalize all of the changes. I look back now and can hardly recognize the person I was before. Rosa and Pedro are a regular part of my life now. It is like I have found a long lost sister, and adopted Pedro as a son. I will finally meet Rosa face to face in Spain this summer. I know you will be there with me in spirit too.

I know you are at peace where you are. I delight in the thought that Carmen, Rosa’s mother, was waiting with open arms to meet you there as well. Your family expanded in heaven the day you died as mine did here on earth with Rosa and Pedro.

Mom, I know the months, weeks and days that passed after your stroke must’ve seemed like an eternity to you, not being able to speak, to feed yourself and needing total care just for routine bodily functions. I wish I could’ve helped more and been by your side more than just those few visits. I wanted you to know that those visits were so special to me—to be able to dote on you and help care for you like you did for me over fifty years ago when I was young. I know you loved me and did all you could for me.

Your suffering was for a purpose as it gave me an opportunity to see myself as God sees me and eliminated my fears related to your mental illness. That was not the legacy the Lord destined for you to hand down to me. I am mentally healthy now. And the Lord has helped me to embrace your sensitivity and faith as the legacies I want to impart to others.

Thank you, Mom, for your sacrifices and your final gift of unconditional love.  I look forward to the day we are reunited in eternity. 

Love,
Ardis

~ Ardis Nelson