lumpy drop biscuits

I’m going to attempt to reach the deeper aspects of thought today through sleeping with bread, but I cannot promise success. I am still experiencing great muddle-headedness. My husband would say, “Yes, and the difference would be?”

Perhaps today is the perfect day to examine times when I have felt whole and those in which I have known myself to be fragmented. Taking a cue from Mary’s SWB post, I am not going to restrict myself simply to the past week for this one.

As far as fragmentation, I would have to award a tie for first place. The two times in my life that have caused me to stop and view the pieces of myself strewn across eternities were both major influences on my life and who I have become. They both involved loss: the heart-wrenching loss of control when someone I cared about was hurting, and the unimaginable pain of losing my son.

When the man I loved went through trauma many years ago, as I watched it happen, not knowing what to do, terrified that I was simply making mistake after mistake, the pain I felt for him tore my soul into kite ribbons and sent them flying in a gale. Nothing I had experienced up to that point in my life had ever made me so fully dependent upon God – nothing else was left to lean on. Yet, ironically, I also turned away from acting in a godly fashion even as I relied completely on His strength to keep my naked soul in His incubating warmth.

When my son died mere hours before he was born, I needed the knowledge of that earlier loss to help me understand I could survive. I needed the cries and requirements of my living children to pull the few remaining shards of my broken self together. I needed the arms of God to help me know He cried with me and for me, and I was not alone – that no matter how far the fragments were scattered, they were all within His grasp. It was a time that had to be stepped through from second to second – anything longer was too great a burden to bear. Gradually, those seconds stretched into moments, hours, days, and eventually years. Many of the pieces returned to me in different form than they had existed before, but somehow the puzzle still fit together.

Wholeness, strangely, has also come to me through loss, but loss of a different kind. My body was swollen with the impending reality of my first child. When I lost him as a part of me, and he became fully himself, the moment he emerged from me, and I was a parent for the very first time, I felt more whole than I had ever felt in my life. Suddenly I saw the nature of things with a clarity alien to this temporal world. I inhaled the knowledge that I had aligned with my purpose. I knew love like I had never known love – more deeply understood the enormity of God’s love for me. Isn’t that what it means to be whole?

What I need to take away from this self-study today is a reminder to never take the great gift of love I have been given for granted. Every breath, every smile, every pair of grumpy eyebrows is a lesson, is a touch, is a visceral reminder of the astounding uniqueness that is my life.