Though it's a bit annoying, I find it incredible that Jacob will not keep clothes on right now.  He is constantly stripping.  In the dead of winter, too!  He came running into the kitchen, very clumsily, midway through removing his shirt.  He needed some help so he asked, "Mommy, can you take my belly off?"

But today, during a type of cops-and-robbers session, Jacob told me, "I'm going to kill yourself and die you!"  I love boys.

To take a break from the overwhelming amount of responses to my last post...

One aspect of death that has a funny way of lifting some of the emotional burden is the copious amount of paperwork you receive.  And not just "what is your subscriber number" paperwork, but very often you receive lots of articles on dealing with loss, the scientific specifics behind the grieving process, and what have you.  Honestly, sometimes you can forget the whole thing and get the feeling you're simply some med student, studying the human psyche.  I remember perusing said paperwork the day of my birth.  There was this one little paper on the "grief timetable", and I remember trying to take a serious evaluation of where I was at on that timetable.  I actually recount this in laughter now.  I can vividly remember sitting on my hospital bed and thinking, oh man, it looks like anger is next in line; wonder what that'll be like.  As though grief really follows this rigid timeline.  Like first comes love, then comes marriage.

It's been nearly six months now.  The realities of what's happened and all the trauma can get lost in the shuffle in the beginning due to the generous amount of love and support.  It just floods in.  My mother in-law has shared memories with me of what it was like after her eldest daughter, Shayne, died.  She said that she had almost nothing to do with all the after-funeral arrangements - the breakfast, the this, the that - because her friends just rallied around her and took care of all the details.  It really is so lovely to have people like this in your life.  Eventually all that initial excitement dies down, and reality can hit you so severely.  And lest I sound like I am inadvertently petitioning people for more meals and letters and things, I promise that I'm just making a point about this whole grief thing.  A broken leg won't heal if you just walk on a crutch your whole life.  Physical therapy is intense and crucial to the whole healing process.

So reality continues to sink in hard, and I find that my quaint little grief timetable is really just a piece of paper.  Grief is just too unpredictable to intricately map out for people.  There's no pretty and perfect pattern.  It comes in waves.  Sometimes you're prepared for them and can ride them out like it was the easiest thing you ever did.  Sometimes all you can do is just look at them while they crash on top of you and thrash you around a bit.  In all this, it is still possible to hold fast to Christ.  Hanging on by a tiny thread is still hanging on.

Despite my frustration with all of this, my darkest moments of pain in this loss provide me with some of the sweetest lessons.  Just the other night, I was reading a new post, Faith in Hard Times, over at Femina and thinking on a verse she had referenced.  It's a verse I had heard quoted by many a Calvinist in defense of God's sovereignty and, for that reason, always assumed I had fully understood its meaning.  In the book of Job (chapter two, verse 10), he responds to his own wife's foolish remarks with, "What? shall we receive good at the hand of God, and shall we not receive evil?"  I realize how guilty I have been of wrongly interpreting God's countenance by what He hands out.  The Christian God is not some fickle deity, pouring out sunshine when He's pleased and rainshowers when He's not (or vice versa).  His own crucifixion was not withheld from Christ, despite having begged for it through bloodsweat and tears.

While doing dishes the other night, I began thinking about high school.  I was laughing as I remembered scrambling for some Proverb to use as my yearbook quote.  I felt this resignation.  Like, if I've got one chance to show people what I believe, it's right here, in my yearbook quote of all places.  I came across Proverbs 16:9 and thought, good enough.  Very simple, it reads, "A man's heart deviseth his way: but the LORD directeth his steps."  I began thinking about that verse a lot and how its truth has been so evident to me now, in my own life.  My life is currently undertaking a major diversion from what I had planned and I can tell you, I am bucking it with all my strength.  But even still, God is proving steadfast and gracious.  This proverb, once a meaningless verse I plucked for a silly yearbook quote, has now become this resounding gong of truth to me.

I used to babysit my cousins from time to time when I was a teenager.  These two, a brother and sister very close in age, I would babysit very often.  My aunt and uncle had divorced, and when she needed to take on a full-time job, she needed someone to be there when the kids got home from school and what not.  Danielle and Frankie were a real trip, and I have a lot of good memories with them.  It was close to Christmas one year and Danielle, owning to the fact that having split parents meant splitting just about everything in two, decided to make Christmas shopping very easy on her parents that year.  She whipped out the ol' JCPenney catalog, made a list of all her Christmas wishes, listing the price of each item, tallied it all up, split it in half, and happily provided her mother and father each with their own bill.  You would forgive the insolence of it if you had seen how sweetly she had done it.  I think that I've often done this for God, completely unaware of it and/or swearing it was only making plans while remaining submissive to His own will.  I'd provided all the paperwork, and I only needed Him to sign off on it.

It's tough to find the balance between good, godly preparation and a prideful ambition.  I've confronted this most in having and bringing up children.  Truly, more often you find some reasonable scientific explanation for your blessed life rather than humbly affirming, "So it is, the Lord has been gracious."  And all too often, I've assigned these conduits in which God must certainly deliver some blessing.  As long as I breastfeed, my kid will not have any allergies or health complications.  If I just have a homebirth, nothing will go radically wrong.  If I take all of my prenatal vitamins, I'll experience no pregnancy complications.  If I stay away from vaccinations, my child will not get autism.  As long as I co-sleep, my child will never have trust issues.  If I have a strict schedule, my child will never misbehave.  If I respond immediately to every whimper, my child will not have major disciplinary issues.  So long as I eat healthy, I'll never get cancer.  If I just hop on one foot, exercise for 45 minutes every other day, and mix up and drink up some combination of salt and beets, I'll never get stretch marks.

I am certainly not saying that one or any of these things, in and of themselves, are silly or wrong or stupid.  (Well ok, the last one is totally ridiculous.)  But I think that at times, we start believing in them themselves.  Or as I mentioned before, without them, we have not provided this conduit by which God surely must bestow His blessing.  As though all of these practices are guaranteed successes.  Looking back, I know that I have done this.  And today, I suffer the consequences of such thinking and often ask myself, "Well how come the crack-mother over there can have three, perfectly healthy babies that she doesn't even want or care for; and here I am, constantly giving myself over in service to God, and this happens?"  If our practices and works merited us God's favor, then His Only Son was bloodied and crucified for absolutely no reason.  Furthermore, the Christian life does not guarantee us health and wealth and sunshine.  On the contrary, Jesus tells us that we will experience suffering and there will be crosses to bear.  We should not be fearful or dismayed by this for we seek a crown, an inheritance, that is imperishable.  And the reception of that is 100% guaranteed, so long as we persevere.  Christians will experience death only once and then, the most glorious life they could ever imagine that will go on for an unfathomable eternity.  Abel and Noah will never die again.