Your Mama’s on Hold

Unless you’re new here, you know that I usually have a Your Mama joke contest today to celebrate the birthday of my youngest brother, Nathan.  He would have been 29 today and he loved a good joke about Mamas.

It has been 7 years since I got to tell him “Happy Birthday!”.  Seven long, grey years.  Every year his birthday comes and the days leading up to it I would feel a need to wake him up, dust him off and bring him out so that we could all have a laugh and share a small moment of Nathan’s world.

This year feels different.

This year, he doesn’t feel present.  He feels past.  He feels really gone.  The pictures are less and less current.  The stories are more historical than recent.    There are people that have been born and added to our family for whom Nathan is a mere ancestor.  Countless celebrations and memories have happened for which Nathan was not a guest.  He is gone. And now, this year, the reality of that is stark and oppressive.

I think there has always been a hint of thought lurking in my brain that somehow we just had to get through the agony of losing Nathan and once we got through it things would return to normal and fantastic.  Somehow he would return. We just had to get through the hard part.

So I soldiered on; weeping, wailing, and mourning.  Dutifully bearing the weight of grief because I somehow thought that this cloud would pass and we would get our normal lives back.  This year, the truth of what “normal” looks like is ever present and there is no escaping it.  It has been, in a word, depressing.  There is no bringing him back.  There is no going back to the old days.  There is no fixing this.

It has been a dark couple of weeks leading up to today.  I have done a lot of hiding from my family and escaping to quiet corners with vapid celebrity gossip columns and more chocolate than a person should eat in a lifetime.  I appreciate the patience of those who know me who have allowed me the space to feel this new ache.

So, the current state of grieving is that there is no getting over it, there is no getting past it.  There is only getting through it and I will spend my lifetime getting through it.

Depressed with me yet?

Turn that frown upside down.  Let’s talk about what’s awesome about the grief of the one who believes in Absolute Truth, shall we?  My belief is solid.  I absolutely know that there is a Heaven, there is God, there is The Holy Spirit, there is Jesus Christ, there is salvation for those who bear the name of Christ and there is no question of what Nathan’s reality is today.

I am not of those who grieve without hope.  If you are reading this and you are a flaky Christian, a non-Christian, or one who believes that there are many truths and we must find the one that best suits us: you must be told that one day every knee will bow and every mouth will confess that Jesus is LORD and that His reign will be forever.  There is no getting around that and my prayer for you is that your moment of bent knee and confession isn’t met with the awful, soul crushing reality that you hadn’t done so before His return.

How about we make this just a shade lighter before I sign off?  In a few hours I will be posting the annual Nathan Dodd Your Mama Joke contest along with the very serious rules for participating.  The winner will receive our fabulous t-shirt.  I would link to a picture of the t-shirt from last year, but I lost about a year’s worth of posts to a glitch.  Shame. Just trust me that the shirt is awesome and you want it.