When I suddenly lost my wife and the mother of my young sons, Mary, in February of this year, I felt an emptiness, a hole inside my personality. The edges were ragged and distorted. Sinews of what was left of me were pulled in and broken off in the black space. I was bleeding out into it, chasing the loss and disappearing.
God’s love poured into it. A healing light filled the space and touched every abrasion, laceration, and amputation. There would be much more work to come, but God saved me from that paralyzing pain.
Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
“Create”: verb: to evolve from one’s own thought or imagination, as a work of art or an invention.
Losing a spouse is an end and a beginning. I don’t know what I could create at the end of a story. I don’t know what work can be accomplished on a finished product. But I can imagine endless possibilities at the beginning. My imagination went to work in that hole in the minutes after Mary died. It was cautious and modest at first. I’d tend to the wounds that God had put on the path to healing and I would start to grow something in that empty space. Like an iguana, I limited myself to the size of the cavity. I didn’t see it at first, but all my imaginings fit in a perceived pit. This hollow space was part of my imagination. Maybe it had been there for a moment, but God hadn’t simply passed through and patched it up, he filled it with an immutable light that would never go out.
I was working in the wrong place.
I had the revelation that I was already whole. I wasn’t less, I was more. More equipped to handle hardship, more conscious of pain in myself and others, more understanding of individuals who I had previously thought different from me. It wasn’t a complete revelation. Nine months later and, at times, I find myself trying to fill a hole that isn’t there. In one moment, I’m learning, growing, and reaching out into the world with curious wonder. In the next, I’m longing.
I’m going to make myself stronger today, more whole. I’m going to wake up each day and renew that pledge.
God bless,
Jason