Many Fridays I used to wake the boys up and say, "Good morning, it’s my favorite day of the week!” I loved that we had an entire weekend ahead of us. I typically don’t work on Fridays and so it was a day I wasn’t rushed to get home and back out the door.
Julian would probably have a friend over after school or maybe he’d go hang with his friend Alex and then text us around 9pm asking if he could just stay the night. We missed having him around but he loved being at Alex’s house staying up too late and playing Clash of Clans or whatever video game they were into at the time.
Most Fridays, we stopped at Chick fil A on the way home from school and Julian got a 12 count nugget, fries with Chick fil A sauce, and an Ice Dream cone. He thought that was the dumbest name for it and insisted I just ask for an Ice CREAM cone instead…they would know what I meant. That boy could put away some Chick fil A.
Today marks eight weeks of painful Fridays. Eight weeks without our boy. Eight weeks of being students in the School of Grief. We relive that Friday over and over again like the worst kind of falling dream, only we never wake up. And not just at 5:30pm but all day. One foot in front of the other. Breathe in, breathe out. That’s what Fridays are now and if I’m honest, every other day too.
We’re freshman in this School but as we’re learning, there’s no hurrying the lessons and certainly no cheating the process…it’s a lifelong enrollment. There’s no professor quite like Grief. No pastor or teacher that can teach you the things that Sorrow can. Lessons on humility, faith, complete trust, the utter littleness of man. The lessons taught on the Via Delarosa can be learned by no other means.
Noy and I are both Type A. We are problem solvers by nature. I told my kids on many occasions, If you don’t like your circumstances, it’s within your power to change them…be a problem solver.
I prided myself in the ability to change what I didn’t like about life. The whole, “the Lord helps those who help themselves” kind of mindset, I guess. But NEWS ALERT to myself: there’s no fixing this. There’s no problem solving my way out of grief. This is our life and it’s never going away. I must put my entire dependence not on any ability of my own, but on Christ alone. Truly, I have been humbled.
But I’m in good company. Christ was humbled on a Friday too. Of course He had no sin of his own. He had no rude awakening. He knew what was coming and submitted humbly. I am still learning to submit day after day after day. To take up my cross daily.
Those aren’t just churchy words to me anymore. When my faith is shaky and I wonder if this really will be worth it in the end, if God really is Sovereign, I chime in with Peter when Jesus asked if he too was going to desert him, “Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words that give eternal life.” There is no other way to process this kind of grief and not come up completely empty.
Today, I’m so thankful Jesus was willing to walk that Road of Sorrow. To humble himself to obedience unto death, even death on a cross!
I pray you all have a blessed weekend. That you know my Christ and what He did for you on a Friday afternoon. Thank you for your continued prayers, snacks, books, notes, texts. Please don’t ever stop. We love the reminders that our boy is not forgotten.
xo
Dawn
My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, Oh God, will not despise. Ps. 51:17
Photo from our last Easter as a family of 6.
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