I spent the early part of the morning pulling weeds in my flower beds. This mindless activity offered my brain some time to think … to process the events of the past eighteen months. Yesterday my sister took her last breath after a long, painful battle with cancer. It’s an understatement to say that the period of her illness was difficult. Anyone who’s walked this journey with a loved one understands the devastation. But now her earthly trial is over. She’s free to flourish at last.
Birds, butterflies and bees flit around me while I work to rid my flowers of the choking weeds surrounding them. With gentle hands, I carefully uproot the invaders opening space for my perennials to grow. Up to this moment, they’ve competed for the nourishing soil, sunshine, and rain. But now with these intruders gone, the flowers are free to flourish at last.
While the weeds encircled the flowers, their true beauty lay hidden. However, as soon as I opened the space around them, their hidden magnificence was revealed. Isn’t our human condition much the same? While we yet live on earth, so many burdens weigh us down. These encumbrances hide our true beauty beneath bodies that are slowly failing. But someday, the Lord will lift all these burdens and we will rise to meet him in the sky. Free to flourish at last.
Somedays I long for that time to arrive soon. But, thank goodness, it’s not up to me to decide the hour or the day of Jesus’ return. Until the moment He carries me home, I carry His Spirit within me as His ambassador. If I’ve discovered anything from my sister’s cancer journey, it’s this. My job … our job is to carry Jesus’ sacrificial love to a weary world. The whole reason for our existence is to learn to love well. Sometimes a path of suffering serves to show us the way.
Through this life, we experience both joy and pain together. They are inextricably connected. The price of loving deeply is to open myself up to pain and sorrow. Even so, I would never forfeit the joy I experienced with Beth to avoid the pain. To do so would forfeit all of life’s beauty. No, I choose to love even knowing that more pain will surely follow. Now I grieve but someday my heart will overflow with joy. When I follow my sister to our eternal home, there will be no more pain and no more grief. God will wipe away every tear. Like my flowers here on earth, we will be free to flourish at last.
Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
Leo Tolstoy
Goodbye for now, Beth. Miss you until we meet again.
