Loss

Loss never gets any easier, its just loses its sting. I feel like I have soaked in a sea of loss the last 7 years. I have definitely gained way more then I actually lost in the long run, but it doesn't make loss any less painful.

I have lost actual people to old age and illness, so many I can't count them all anymore. Wrinkled faces and bright eyes that have lived an entire lifetime and made me a small part of it. I have felt keenly the loss of them in my life and within the world.

I lost a marriage and won myself in the process. I feel the loss of the person I used to be and remember some things fondly, but never want to go back. It was a half life and I have been reborn as painful as rebirth is.

I have lost myself and found myself again. 

My children are no longer small anymore, they are all teens now, and I feel the loss of their childhood even if they do not. 

HOPE

This month's theme at church is HOPE. It reminded me that 'hope' used to be my focus word years ago. The word 'hope' has seen me through some tough and dark times in my life, when I have felt the most hopeless.

I like the scripture from the Bible, Hebrews 11.1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. It always reminded me that even faith has a basic building block of hope. If you just had hope, it was on its way to faith. When I suffer from depression I often cling tightly to hope, as that is all I can muster. Faith seems too big when you are in the depths of depression, yet just hoping for faith, hoping for something, is possible and not so overwhelming.

One of my favorite poems about hope is by Emily Dickinson:

Hope     

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune--without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

I hadn't thought about hope for a while now, maybe because I haven't needed to cling to it so tightly. It's comforting to think about it perching in my soul, waiting for the time I need it most of all.