Pressing On

It seems oddly harder these days - the grief seems deeper and more painful - I've heard that this is normal, but its depth still comes as some surprise. We are trying to clean out our son's room this weekend - and little things are really tripping me up; his clothes for one - we plan to pack them up and take them to Goodwill - of course we'll probably save a couple of things, and friends have already taken some or asked for specific pieces to remember him by. Yet I find it terribly hard to do - I've never thought that I would be one of those people who closed up the room and left it as some kind of grim 'memorial' yet I find it exceedingly hard to get through this.

Part of it is all mixed up in my being a pack rat anyway - it was rather hard to take several boxes or R/C car, PC Gamer, and assorted audio technical magazines to the recycling center today - both because that is the sort of stuff I tend to also collect, and because it was a reminder of how much alike we were in that way.

Friends are here again this weekend, so that helps - and another friend came by yesterday and took the 4 computers that were going to be 'someday' projects that were in his room. They will go to a local place that refurbishes computers by putting Linux and open source productivity software on them and makes them available to people who need them. Keeping them out of landfills, and providing people with limited resources with usable computers - and I know that he would approve.

Of course, the hardest thing in all of this is that it is an increasingly tangible reminder that he is not coming home again - not to this house anyway; I was thinking about the first night I held him in my arms when he came home from the hospital as a baby - a mixture of awe and love and fear. He was a living soul, who was our responsibility for the rest of his life; his mother wasn't coming to get him later - we were the ones. I was struck with the immensity of that responsibility and the awesome idea that the fate of his very soul hung in the balance in no small part due to how we raised and trained him in the knowledge and fear of God.

We were mostly Baptist then - I had not experienced the 'other' mysteries that God would teach us in our time at the Christian Reformed Church - very Calvinist - election, and predestination and the like - so I was not yet so persuaded about God's immutable claim on him (or not?). Early on my wife said she prayed and, like Samuel's mother, gave him to God. I confess it took me much longer to do that...

But we do have the joy of knowing that he did run his race well, and obtained the prize - and nothing left behind is really of much significance; relics of a true and wonderful life, but in themselves of no immediate value to us - and as I'm finding now, they can represent a snare and a burden in some ways. Of course we will never forget him - and there will be things we will want to keep as remembrances - but it's not likely that dozens of t-shirts and shorts and suits and all the accumulated wardrobe of a normal 24 year old's life will ultimately have any lasting value to us.

My mother shared that when her brother's wife died of cancer, he left the house for several hours leaving instruction with his sisters to 'clear all the clothes out of the house' that belonged to his wife. He returned and found clothes in the closet, which he grabbed up and angrily took out to his sisters demanding to know why they hadn't taken them out as well - but of course, my mom pointed out that those were the clothes she had brought when she came to stay with them - and that they were her's, not his wifes. It is only recently that I understood his reaction - perhaps I just need to make one brave, quick pass to find a special t-shirt, or bandanna, or other remembrance, and then let our friends bundle it all up in boxes and take it away, so we can get on with the business of setting up the room he wanted as a 'refuge' or 'dorm' for traveling missionaries, students, friends, or other wayward souls in need of some kind of sanctuary or resting place.

As Paul says in Hebrews 12:1-3:

1 Wherefore seeing we also are compassed about with so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, and let us run with patience the race that is set before us,

2 Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God.

3 For consider him that endured such contradiction of sinners against himself, lest ye be wearied and faint in your minds.

I see how easily I can be chained to the past in ways that are not honoring of him or God - so I need to press on and find again the path of the race set before us until we meet him again in heaven.