'Til The Blue

But when things like this happen I’m always afraid of throwing quick words, as well meaning as they may be, at such a deep, dark and complex pain. I’ve said this before, maybe even in a Facebook post, but the words that I found most comforting and encouraging in the darkest moments when our daughter Maria went to heaven, especially at the beginning of that journey, were words like, “I’m so sorry… there are no words...but I will just be with you in this.”
I found myself wrestling with this again just a few days ago as I was asked to sing at yet another funeral of a friend who went to Heaven way before any of us would’ve expected. I’m so thankful for the privilege of sharing a couple of songs to basically say, “I’m with you…I don’t understand this…I’m trusting God with you and “for you” that the story isn’t over yet.”

Our experience of walking through the “valley of the shadow of death” on our journey has taught, or more accurately, continues to teach us many things. One of those is the fact of something Psalm 27 says when it talks about seeing “the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.”

There were many moments when the pain was so intense and the darkness was so dark, that it was hard to imagine it would ever even be appropriate to laugh again, or even just feel joy again. But our family took the next breath and next step through those days with people around us helping us believe that we would in fact see goodness and beauty and feel joy again. One of those first moments I remember so vividly (I actually wrote about it in my book) was the