Lent and Loss

By Sylvia Harrison (SDI 2018)

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of the season of Lent.  Many of us will go and receive the cross of ash on our foreheads. We will be blessed by all it symbolizes and all it calls us to. However, those of us have who have experienced loss may not. To us the past year feels as if  it has been strewn with ashes of grief and loss that may feel closer to Job’s experience than we care to admit.  We are sitting in a great pile of ash, as pile of destruction that we feel we cannot recover from. 

That would describe my life in 2010 and 2011.  Loss just rolled like waves over me. It started with the long waited for surgery, number 28 if I remember correctly, that was supposed to correct the scar tissue in my daughter’s nose that had kept her from breathing through her nostrils for two years.  It failed, and actually made things worse. Loss of hope runs deep when it is your child who struggles the most. The stress of finding a new surgeon and the cost of having surgery in Chicago were overwhelming.  A few weeks later I broke out in Shingles. The outbreaks lasted 2 years. By December my mother who was living with us was showing signs of something stoke like.  She was diagnosed with a brain tumor in January.  She was given 6 months to live. My mother-in-law’s health started failing. She passed away in early May of 2011. The F-5 tornado hit Joplin, our home town where we had just been for Lora’s funeral, May 22nd.  Maryann’s 8-hour surgery in Chicago was May 23rd. We were required to return to Chicago for checkups weekly for many months. My mother’s decline lasted longer than 6 months. She passed away just after Thanksgiving 2011. I was done. I was never so glad to see a year end.

When Lent 2012 rolled around I had no energy to enter in in any kind of conventional way.  I had no tears left to cry. I didn’t have the strength to confess.  I had no appetite for food so fasting was my norm. The best I could do was sit on the couch and stare.  And that was good enough. That was my prayer.

If you find yourself in a heap of ashes this year I invite you to sit.  Christ will meet you there. “In our aching he is breathing and in our breathing he is there.”  Even if you don’t have the strength to call or cry for help, he will answer. Is. 58:9 

 Receive this blessing:  May you know the presence of the Lord who created you out of dust and breathes life into you again.  May you be blessed with time that it takes to grieve. May you be gifted with at least one person who can weep with you as you weep.