The Beachhead of Grace

As I began this new year, something happened inside of me that was momentous, or at least a moment that will affect my perspective for the rest of the year.

That moment was the thought, "It's time to look ahead." For the past 5+ months, I have been spending my waking, sleeping and all hours in-between looking back, remembering, reflecting and grieving. But that morning, January 1, 2010, I realized that it was time to turn a corner. The reflecting, grieving, remembering--all will still continue, but at the same time, I will choose to anticipate, plan and hope.

The day that changed my life on this side of eternity was Sunday morning, July 26th. The time was 3:30 a.m. The place was Estes Park, Colorado. My husband, Chris, and three of my four children and I had just arrived the previous day with 9 other people for a week of hiking, touring, laughing and enjoying the beauty of those amazing mountains.

I was awakened at 3:30 by my husband's snores. As I drifted out of my sleep mode, I realized that those snores were unusual, and after the fourth one, he stopped. I turned over and tried to awaken him, but he would not stir.

I called for our best friends, Bill and Char Adams, who were in the same room with us, telling them that something was wrong. Bill is an MRI technician and Char is a cardiac nurse. Immediately, they turned the light on, pulled back his covers and recognized he was in distress....They lifted him to the floor to administer CPR while I frantically phoned 911 and called out for our other friends in the home to get up and pray.

Chris never regained consciousness and was pronounced dead at 4:22 a.m. in the Estes Park Medical Clinic. My three children and I left that day to come home with our lives and our future turned upside down. Chris was 51 years old and died as a result of a genetic heart condition. Though in excellent shape otherwise, his enlarged heart did not enable him the long life we had been anticipating.

These past five months have been the most difficult we have ever encountered. Chris and I were married 32 years and I had always told him he was the best man I knew. We deeply loved each other and that love will be realized again when I see him in heaven. But for now I must wait.

My hope for this blog is that this part of my journey can be chronicled and maybe help someone else who is experiencing difficulties, as well.

If someone actually reads this, you might wonder why I entitled my blog "The Beachhead of Grace." This phrase actually came to me when I was writing a contemporary psalm for a special service at our church, which was open to anyone to share.

I will post the psalm separately, but for the purpose of my introduction, that phrase was a response to a sermon that our pastor had given one Sunday. The night before that particular Sunday I had journalled about the waves of grief that had overwhelmed me. In the sermon the next day, our pastor spoke on "waves of grace," and I could see then that His waves of grace vastly overrode my waves of grief. And in my poem that I wrote later I recognized that God had established a beachhead of grace on the shores of my heart. I know that that beachhead cannot be overrun or overcome by anything that is sent my way.

In this blog, I have decided to post my journal, which I had entitled "Grief in its Raw Form." If you ever want to know how someone is feeling after a painful loss, my hope is that this journal will help you empathize perhaps a bit better and that you will be able to help that person in his or her journey as a result. This is, exactly as titled, a raw rendering of my grief and I am placing myself in a conditiion of vulnerability, which is somewhat disconcerting....

But, here goes!