Sudden Departures into Journeys Unknown

Picture of Family assembled at our house June 2, 2014.

This day five years ago was serene. 29 days later, obliteration. Sarah was 15-weeks pregnant, and then 19-weeks. And at 15-weeks, we had no idea what was about to hit us.

It was the hundredth anniversary of my grandma’s birth, and it was a great opportunity to get the entire extended family together. Grandma had left us 1990. As we gathered, we all pondered the possibilities with Sarah pregnant and all our lives in some kind of normality. Well, the mirage of normalcy anyway.

We really didn’t have a clue. The previous year we were given a child, a ministry, and a home. Fast forward one year, and we were about to lose all three in the space of months. From safety we plunged into an abyss of chaos that we pretended was okay. What else do you do when inwardly you’re screaming?

This article is about the only matter that counts—the loss of our child—and the fact that within life there is always the clear and present danger of a sudden departure into a journey unknown. Not that that is always bad—it is just cataclysmically different.

The journey unknown that we were about to suddenly depart into commenced in a doctor’s office. Likewise, your sudden departure into a journey unknown possibly had its genesis in the innocent transition from the nonchalant living of life, completely unaware of what was about to take place, to that place of your spirit becoming hypervigilant about everything.

This is what loss does. And seasons of loss never involve simply one solitary loss. There is always a myriad of loss, a layering of losses.

It completely reconfigures our perception, because the lens we look through has an indelible taint about it. And we cannot escape it no matter how hard we try.

We know it in the moment we wake up—“oh, not this again!”

We carry it about with us and this enigmatic presence of dread cannot be shaken.

Fast forward 29 days from this wonderful family get-together, and we found ourselves forlorn of options. All our hopes are dashed in an instant. Of course, it’s not the reality, not everything is crushed, but when you face loss, because you’re out of control, it feels like the sky has caved in. I wondered whether if I could tell that earlier version of myself that things were about to change, would it have made a difference? I am not even sure of such a question is relevant.

But it bears considering, what is just around the corner?

None of us should truly want to know if it is a trial or a struggle or a hardship we dare not contemplate. We know the reality; such a situation will find us; and we don’t need to worry it into existence. It is futile to either worry about it or to ignore its possibility value.

So many things changed about our lives in an instant on that July 1 day in 2014. We didn’t really know at that point how much change would enter our lives, and we certainly didn’t know how much God would show up, and how incredibly present he would be, but we did know we could only live in the moment.

To live each moment is enough. There is something that life at its depths teaches us that we could not learn otherwise.

Such realities that spend us beyond our own ability to cope transfer us to coping mechanisms we were previously not connected to or weren’t desperate enough to try.

It’s only when you’re at a depth darker than ever that you’re prepared to look for the flashlight you never had but now find you do have. You find that God has already provided what you need, and if only you ask for it, that it is given to you.

This is faith; to trust that you have enough.

Sudden departures into journeys unknown seem to be hellish, but in fact it is heaven that awaits, because we don’t truly know the God of the cross until the cross of God has emerged before us.

It is inconceivably counterintuitive to imagine sudden departures into journeys unknown as a good thing. It may seem unconscionable to think in these ways at the time. Yet we need such a hope to get us all the way through the collapsing despair of it.

There may be sweet whisper, the Presence of God to be found in the quietest voice, that trickle of hope amid the torrent of despair. We must cling to the hope as if it were fact. Then we find that such a hope is fact, and this is the most marvellous news!

Whilst life is well, and all is good, and gratitude is easy, and happiness is available, we ought to more wisely consider that everything that is good and well and easy and available could disappear, and this should cause us to be even more grateful, and to accept that things are forever changing.