The thought of my father leaving me was the source of many anxieties throughout my childhood and into adulthood. When I would share this with him, he would always say that I still have God and He would never leave me or forsake me. Even when he left this world, God would never leave me. I wanted him to promise me that he would never leave me, but he couldn’t. I am glad he didn’t. I am glad that he didn’t lie to me about important matters that could affect my life, or my salvation. He taught me what he knew, he showed me through his actions. He was my father, and I will never meet another person like him.
I know that time will pass, and I will be able to speak about him without masking my emotion, the same way that I am able to discuss hurtful things from my past. Right now, right now, this raw, open cesspool of emotion is a bit more than I can handle in addition to a new internship next week, being a mother, a wife, a sister, and a friend. I am sad, I am not hopeless and I know that he is resting, (not watching over me) but resting peacefully until the Lord comes back. This should give me peace of mind, and most of the time it does, but in those moments, when I pick up the phone to call him, or I sing a song that he enjoyed, or I remember our last few conversations, I am broken, hurt, and disheveled again. I feel as though my whole world has been shaken like a snow globe and people are watching my pain fall all around me.
I do not have sick days, I can’t call into life and request time off to mourn my loving father, or to fight with his hateful widow. Life goes on for the living. It is different now, it is harder now, it is slower now, but I woke up this morning, unable to mourn. Not because I don’t want to, but because I am afraid to. So, to ease this pain, I am praying for peace, I am praying to healing, I am praying for patience and I am praying to forgive those that allow the enemy to use them against me. I have a life to live.
"The living know that they shall die: but the dead know not any thing, neither have they any more a reward; for the memory of them is forgotten. Also their love, and their hatred, and their envy, is now perished; neither have they any more a portion for ever in any thing that is done under the sun." "There is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest." Ecclesiastes 9:5, 6, 10. "The dead praise not the Lord." Psalms 115:17.
Click here for information about the state of the dead: http://www.amazingfacts.org/media-library/study-guide/e/4987/t/are-the-dead-really-dead