A Time

                It was the longest snapshot in my life.  What I mean, is that I didn’t have enough time, could never have had enough time with her, but when she was here, I felt the days were long.  I was weakened and weary most of the time.  Each day, a roller coaster of emotion.  When the evening would at last give way to night and she would finally settle into a peaceful sleep in my arms, restless no more, I would sigh and feel contented, accomplished, and of course, so full of love and pride, my angel baby, breathing deeply on my chest as I rocked and dozed. 

                The days themselves, hectic, and seemingly unending.  I was not a new mother, having two older children.  So, I was busy.  Too busy to hold her for long enough, too tired to fully appreciate the bonding when it happened, duties and responsibilities weighing on my mind, so that I could not just simply absorb the moments of her small coos, her mile-wide smiles.  Oh, yes, I loved them.  I recognized them but never knew these moments would be even more fleeting than for most.  Never knew, that I would one day wish so much for a true unending day.

                And these days of hour to hour changes from frustration to peace, from silly laughter as we all would play to an inside screaming because I desired space, pales now in comparison to that crash from love to loss, the noise of her silence I hear every day.  Joy to sorrow, hope to despair, a light so bright,  in a mere moment of all moments …extinguished. 

In the many, many truly long days after her death, I changed in ways indescribable.  At the hospital, when she was handed to me in all her newness, still wet, but so beautiful, and I held her, I knew as I did with the others, that she was a gift.  Though spent from labor, I knew that the work was the Lord’s and not mine.  Only He could create such lovely a creature.  Her eyes shut, and still instinctively, she knew me, desired me and what I could give her. And I was undeserving of that, so unworthy to have such a great wonder placed in my arms.  That I knew. I never, ever doubted that. 

And so, how when once so certain of His kindness, cannot even the soundest mind become confounded upon what it perceives as the ultimate betrayal?  He gives and takes away, but why?  If the giver once exalted as so good for bestowing such undeserved a gift can now He be viewed as good no longer?  Those thoughts, unavoidable, are what make up your hell in that beginning of the end.   Nothing will wrench your heart more, than to know about never again.  To have experienced the utmost joy, to have held in your very arms tangible hope, to have seen in one’s eyes a light, so long gone in you and then to weep, to mourn, to see no more, may crush faith, will certainly allow in doubt.

But some questions don’t have answers.  The human mind can’t comprehend the heaviest weight.  But it is said, there is a time; a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to be born and a time to die.* And in time comes a time of comfort for the soul, for the seeker, for the believer, in He who is good, whose ways are not our ways, who both gives and takes away.