Shouts of Lament

Grandma's House. If you would have told me when I was a kid that one day I would lose all of that joy and adventure, I wouldn't have believed you. It just didn't seem possible that life as I knew it would change. But change it did, dramatically.

I was in my first year of college away from home when the telephone rang. The memory is so fresh. It was my father on the other end of the phone. Through choked up tears He broke the news. "Grandma is gone."

Grandma was the closest person to me to die. She had lost control of her car down an old country highway not three miles from her home, my personal paradise. The news was devastating.

Looking back now, I realize I lost more than a grandmother that day. I lost access to my boyhood proving grounds. Not long after the funeral, all of her possessions were sorted through and the home was sold. Please understand, that land was more than just a piece of real estate. It was an intricate part of my masculine journey. It was the only place in my little world where I felt most alive. Able to be my truest self there, it was my sanctuary, my holy ground.

Just like that, it was all gone, torn away. Disbelief set in, as for most people when they suffer significant losses and devastating disappointments. Divorcees, amputees, and surviving spouses know what I'm talking about. At the moment, our hearts reject the reality. Again the secret to our hearts rise to the surface. This is not the life we want.

Even more devastating than Grandma's death is the dilemma that I, like so many others, got use to my loss. We come to a point where we embrace the idea that this really is the way things are supposed to be. As a result, we struggle with the truth that we were not made for this.

Echoes from the Past

I know, I know I've been gone for quite awhile. Well, I'm back and I plan to pick up where I left off. I've been doing sort of a retake on John Eldredge's book "Desire". Here you'll be able to see my own dialogue with the book as I journey through. I hope to be able to bring a little more illumination to the importance of desire in our lives.

Growing up, I used to enjoy Sundays when my mom and dad would take my brother and me to my Grandma's house for Sunday dinner. Every week it was like a small family reunion as aunts, uncles, and cousins would enjoy the meal together. My Grandma lived out in the country with no signs of the city within a ten mile radius. It was a little boy's dream.

After dinner, all the adults would talk, watch Sunday football, and nap while the young ones would go and try to find some sort of mischief to get into. We had plenty of opportunities. We had trees to climb and woods to explore. There were tractors to pretend with and dried up wells to play in. Introduce some small firecrackers and BB guns, and the fun tripled. Even now as I write there is a flutter within that desperately wants to go back to the way things were. (Is there a place in your past that you would like to go back to?)

My how we try to hold on to the past. Some will work to recreate it. They get into activities that would in some way regenerate their past feelings of joy. Others will choose the path of reminiscing by holding onto childhood memorabilia, no matter how insignificant. Ever wonder how cameras and scrap booking got to be so popular? We're afraid of these moments fading away into oblivion. "Our losses seem to say that the life we prize will never be ours, never come to stay."(Eldredge, Desire, p. 6)