Facing Forever What We Have Lost
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 totted 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 “gotton over.” When our sons and daughters marry, when a certain musical refrain wafts into consciousness, when our grand child’s eyes have just that shade of blue, we will remember. And the old scar will pinch.
Some of us became adults within this relationship. Its soft tension bent our attitudes and framed our values….We did not know the weight of love until its release.
Verse:
Ruth 1: 18-22
(18) When Naomi realized that Ruth was determined to go with her, she stopped urging her. (19) So the two women went on until they arrived in Bethlehem, the whole town was stirred because of them, and the women exclaimed, “Can this be Naomi? (20) “Don’t call me Naomi,” she told them. “Call me Mara, because the Almighty has made my life very bitter. (21) I went away full, but the Lord has brought me back empty. Why call me Naomi? The Lord has afflicted me; the Almighty has brought misfortune upon me. (22) So Naomi returned from Moab accompanied by Ruth the Moabitess, her daughter-in-law, arriving in Bethlehem as the barely harvest was beginning.
Psalm 68: 4-6
(4) Sing to God, sing praise to his name, extol him who rides on the clouds- his name is the Lord- and rejoice before him. (5) A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. (6) God sets the lonely in families, he leads forth the prisoners with singing; but the rebellious live in a sun-scorched land.
Psalm 119:76
(76) May your unfailing love be my comfort, according to your promise to your servant.
Psalm 146
(1) Praise the Lord. Praise the Lord, O my soul. (2) I will praise the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live. (3) Do not put your trust in princes, in mortal men, who cannot save. (4) When their spirit departs, they return to the ground; on that very day their plans come to nothing, (5) Blessed is he whose help is the God of Jacob, whose hope is in the Lord his God, (6) the Maker of heaven and earth, the sea, and everything in them- the Lord, who remains faithful forever. (7) He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free, (8) the Lord gives sight to the blind, the Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous. (9) The Lord watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and the widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. (10) The Lord reigns forever, your God, O Zion, for all generations.
Praise God