Words

At a memorial service, a friend I haven't seen in awhile asks what I'm doing these days. How do you put into words that your heart has been wrecked, that you have been broken? That you just want to find a way to believe in the midst of the pain? That grief has made a mess of your life and you are just maybe now finding hope again? He shares this has been his fourth memorial service in a few months, and I tell him I'm in the same boat. Broken always finds a way to reach broken. 

I tell him what my days involve now...besides coping with grief. I tell him I'm a writer. It's an identity I've had most of my life but failed to fully accept. I'm trying to learn the brave way. He tells me that he recently taught a class at the local university on writing and that it got him thinking about the power of words. 

"I realized that words are a part of everything. Pictures can do a lot, but words? words describe things. They give meaning to things." 

I tell him, "Words make up life." 

A son eulogizes his now-dead father. He shares fond, yet emotional memories of days gone by and one can feel the loss seeping out of every part of him. He pauses to collect himself. He reveals that distance had driven a wedge between him and his dad the last couple years because both took a "stance." One feels the regret. 

Words can divide and rip right open, or they can sew together and heal. Words can do anything we want them to. 

As I have reflected long and hard on lives well-lived and ended in recent years, it occurs to me that once a person is gone, it's as if we open the book that is called their life and read it in its entirety for the first time. While they are alive, we all enter that story at different times and seasons and, while the person shares parts of the story with us that we may or may not have lived through, there's something different about seeing the finished script at the end. Nothing can be changed. It is finished. 

At nearly every service I've attended, I've learned things about the people being mourned that I never knew while they were alive. I suppose that's normal. I learned about Jim and his quiet ministry at the local coffee hangout - how he would sit and make friends with the local men who came in and humbly witness to them through wise advice and conversation. How he always looked for a way to help and serve somebody else and would scold you if you didn't give an opportunity to do so...telling you that you "took away [his] blessing!" I learned about how Dallas built much of his community, literally and figuratively. How generations learned hockey because he was willing to teach them. How he housed, fed, and cared for many that needed a hand up in life until they found their way. All chapters in the amazing book that became their life. 

As the chapters pile one on the other in the story that is us, we often become so focused on the present chapter that we forget how it ties into the rest of the whole. When we do look back, we often fixate on the chapters we regret or wish had never been written. We wish they could be ripped out. That we could start over. Forget what happened. It becomes easy to loathe the tale being spun. To hate our own narrative and long for one better. In my own memories, this has been common-place. I've chosen to see all the parts I wish could be removed, desiring for a story less painful instead of accepting mine for what it really is. 

But one thing all this dying has shown me is that the greatest thing one can do in this life is to honestly accept the story in all its chapters. To realize that the past cannot be changed or re-written. We only get one shot at this life. Only today can be redeemed. And the one mistake that truly un-does a story is to wish one had somebody else's and deny their own. 

Embrace your own story in all its forms, and you begin to be re-formed. Re-shaped. Re-made. 

Life is shaped by words. Words that make up who we are and will become. Words that hurt or words that heal. Words that make up memories good or ill. What we remember of the past is largely made up of words. We don't always hold onto things as ties to what was, but we hold onto voices that spoke words. Words we treasured or words we hated. But words still, nonetheless. 

Words make up life, and we are all a book. Stories conceived by God before our birth, being written for the benefit of mankind and the purpose of God. To deny the story as good is to deny the One whose fingerprints are on it everywhere. In who's heart was created the narrative before the foundation of the world. And those who give up on the story, give up on the Creator Himself. 

The people stand around after the service, trading memories. Mourning a life taken suddenly. And I reflect on how the book can be ended quickly. God can put a period and close our book faster than we ever dared believe. We are not here to write our own script and we do not know its closing. But we are here to live the one handed to us. Prepared uniquely for us. And with limited time to do so.

Peace comes in accepting the story of you. The story God knew this world needed. The story only you could live out. 

The chapters will vary in intensity. The narrative will have its share of joy as well as sorrow, pain as well as hope. But Grace has authored every word. And each line speaks of goodness, however hidden. Of love, however obscured. *

* For the sake of context, this post was written back in 2019 and the events/reflections mentioned here are related to circumstances that occurred during that time.