"Don't call me Naomi," she told them. "Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter." Ruth 1:20
Widows. Suddenly we have joined a select community, one we had never thought to enter. We are sisters of sorrow, daughters of the void. Suddenly our identity is linked to what we have lost: husband, marriage, father of our children, friend, provider. After years of bounty, suddenly we are the empty ones. How can this be? Why is the steady current of a life that was years in the making so utterly destroyed? Why is tomorrow so hostile and insecure? We absorb the meaning of forever slowly as days pass like beads on a ring, until we have trotted up so many that we begin to understand - he is not coming back.
Tomorrow the sun rises, and tomorrow and tomorrow. Day by day, we go on. We laugh again; we may even love again. But it is a different life, a new love. The first is not "recovered from," not "gotten over." When our sons and daughters marry, when a certain musical refrain wafts into consciousness, when our grandchildren's eyes have just that shade of blue, we will remember. And the old scar will pinch.
Some of us become adults within this relationship. Its soft tension bent on our attitudes and framed our values . . . We did not know the weight of love until its release.
By Kate Convissor, taken from "Women's Devotional Bible 2"
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment