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Monday, September 14, 2015

An Easy Life

I've not posted anything for a couple weeks...

Mostly, I've not been emotionally capable of it.

Even writing that sentence makes me want to cry.

Old friends from my youth were tragically killed in a car accident.

These are the scenarios no one wants to think about...
they exist in some other alternate universe.

Ty and Terri were their names and they lived in Omaha.
But I knew them when I was 14 as youth leaders here in California.
And, just two weeks before their death,
I saw them in Omaha when we were visiting our family.

I've spent some time thinking about why this death has in so many ways immobilized me.

Is it the memory of innocent youth?
Or that time when I loved Jesus with a whole and infatuated heart?
Maybe it's just remembering how much they loved me...and all of us.
How they took time.
How when they were with you, they were all with you.

And, while I think the missing of these dear people is all of this,
I think mostly it's that last piece...their presence.
I learned once that if you don't have words or advice or anything like that to give someone,
just give them yourself, your presence.
BE with them.
And I think that for the last 30 years of my life,
even though so much distance in so many ways existed between us,
I still knew their presence in my life.

I think the same is true for the thousands of people who watched their funeral.
And the handful of us who were together a couple weeks ago here in California to remember them.
We feel their death so deeply because they were with us so completely.

It couldn't have been easy on them,
but they made it look that way.
It was their gift...this gift of presence.
The gift of being.

We live in a day when to live in a present way is challenging,
not because we carry any different pressures than any other time,
but because it is so easy  to escape.
I can slip away from my children with a simple swipe of my smartphone.
I can enter the lives of those I haven't seen in decades
Or shop
Or read
Or listen
and not BE.

Even now as I write my children have woken from their nap
and I find I must come to a place in this post where I stop
so I can be with them.
Not just because they have physical needs,
but because they need their mom to BE.

This is not easy...
and I find myself craving an easy life.
I don't want to do the hard work of being present,
I don't want to have to give up my life,
myself in order to be with them
or anyone.

And.
I want more for my children
my marriage
my friendships.

I'll be blogging about these things over the next few weeks...
please join me.






5 comments:

  1. This is truly inspiring. I really needed this, thank you! And I am so sorry for the loss of your friends. You and your loved ones are in my prayers

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    1. Jessica, thank you for your thoughts, prayers, and for reading.

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  2. Thanks April! This continues to be a lesson i am learning too. I just want to do and do and not just BE. I think instantly of Martha and Mary. In order to BE we have to become vulnerable and that is really hard. How many times have I been Martha and how many times does Christ want me to be Mary, to just BE at his feet. "41 “Martha, Martha,” the Lord answered, “you are worried and upset about many things, 42 but few things are needed—or indeed only one.[a] Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her.”

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