Grieving and Hoping

After some lighter, or less personal blog posts, tonight I am going to open up.

I am grieving tonight. Six months ago we moved from VA to Washington; and for some reason, tonight, sitting in a hotel in Kansas City, the grief finally came, pouring out in tears and sobs.

Grief over leaving my parents, my brother, my best friends, my favorite people and places and activities.

Most days I'm doing pretty well, and I do like life out in Washington, but I think it's finally hitting me that after the past nine years of being close to my parents, and my friends, and driving home to our house in the woods, and swimming in our neighborhood lake, and going to GMU basketball games, and meeting my college buddies for drinks at Fats, and going to the CAA tournament in Richmond every March--all that is gone, and I'm grieving for that.

I love my family, and my wife's family who is all nearby now. I really enjoy my job, and my new friends. I love the mountains around us. I like our small town, and the people who help care for our kids.

But I miss my life if Virginia. Just as with the other big moves in my life--going from VA to Texas, then Texas back to VA--I have said goodbye to a part of my life, a part of me. So I grieve.

Yet as I think and write and cry through my grief, my focus shifts forward, and toward those around me. 

All this is enhanced because my wife has cancer, and in these early days of diagnosis and exams and consultations, we are uncertain of the future, knowing only that our lives are about to change radically.

I also realize that my life is not be about me, but about Jamie and our kids. 

I am concerned for her, and hopeful for God's healing and blessing. I long to be the man God wants me to be for her. I pray that God will help me love and support her, and provide peace and strength for her and our children.

I pray and work to be able to lay down my life, to live more and more for God and my family. I look for hope of what God will do through this dark time, hope that he will bring us all through this, stronger, gentler, closer, more faithful.

I close with a prayer borrowed from my friend Mike Stavlund, whose writing often encourages and blesses me and captures the parts of my heart that I struggle to express (thank you, Mike):

God of grace and disappointments, God of kindness and pain, God of suffering and healing, God of absence and presence, God of weakness and strength, we worship you. We wrestle with you, and we honor you in all of your ways.