On Wednesday afternoon, a sister (in the Lord) came over to help me start to get organized. I’m a person with hundreds of ideas. Idea people are often not the most organized. And my office was a MESS. So we dug in and after 3 hours, major progress had been made.
My goal over the next two months is to get the room dedicated to my office completely clutter-free, esp. the papers, and to get systems in place so that I can manage a team that can seamlessly handle a larger work-flow.
After the first afternoon of work, the entire floor was cleared – a major accomplishment! Two garbage bags were filled with old papers, boxes of giveaway clothes that had somehow made their home there were moved out, and an old printer that had languished on the floor for months was taken to the trash.
I was so pumped! Getting rid of clutter is so very energizing. We even brought a filing cabinet from the garage and the sister began creating folders and organizing the documents I still need to keep.
When she left, I was still in ‘organize mode’, so I tackled a bookcase which had been reorganized by a well-meaning friend – by size of the books, not subject. I was nearly finished with organizing them in a more useable way when suddenly I found ‘the book’.
My mood did a 180 degree turn. This was the book I had unsuccessfully searched for on July 4, 2017, the day our son drowned. It was the book that described how to resuscitate a drowned person, even hours after the drowning, using Chinese medicine techniques. I had quickly scanned that section years before when I first purchased the book, but didn’t remember the exact instructions. With a mixture of curiosity and dread, I opened to the resuscitation chapter and read through the technique.
All the feelings of the day that Nathan drowned came rushing back. The horror, the grief, the physical ache in my heart, the simultaneous denial and acceptance of what we had just been told. The frantic, clawing desire to do something, anything, to change the outcome.
In my heart of hearts, in my spirit, I KNOW the Lord was in complete control – He didn’t give me a chance to use any of the healing modalities I have studied and practiced over the years. He didn’t allow me or my husband to be with my son when they dragged him from the lake, nor when they took him to the funeral home. It wasn’t until the next day that we received permission to see him.
And I really believe that was by design – the Lord needed to make it very clear to me that He wanted to take Nathan then and He didn’t want me to even attempt to bring him back.
All the rest of that night, I felt that aching in my heart – that ache that I thought had healed, because I hadn’t cried or even felt very sad for the last month. And then there that ache was…
It persisted the next day. As I attended my morning Toastmaster meeting, outwardly I was my normal self, but inside I felt so restless and that hole in my heart felt like it was growing.
Then I remembered the words of Robert Rogers after he lost his wife and 4 children in one fell swoop. “When we lose someone or something in life, something will try to fill that void, something will try to consume us, and I pray that it would be Christ and only Christ.”
Amen, Lord, fill the void. Fill that void with Yourself alone.