Re-Kindled

 Darkness has settled for the night, and I'm spending a moment of peace alone... staring at glowing fire-coals and wondering if a heart has the ability to be revived. One stick of wood on those dwindling embers, however faint, and the flame could be rekindled. Can the same be true for a broken heart?

Days earlier, I passed yet another painful anniversary as I was reminded of the presence of loss yet again and the reality that absence really does make the heart grow fonder, especially if the absence is until eternity and the goodbye feels like a forever. Even though the initial sting of heartache may have worn off sometime ago, a date or a song or a smell or a color or a voice or a face or even a memory can bring it all back and the tears can flow once more...even if it's been years. 

Sitting in front of the fading-glow, all the endings and the farewells seem especially large tonight. I've let go of a lot and sometimes, when this happens over and over and over, you can begin to wonder if it's worth opening your soul again to life, love, and hope. When it feels like all you do is have a deep, meaningful joy for a brief time then are asked to turn loose, you can question if long-term happiness is even a thing. If you should even try to let yourself feel when something tells you its just easier to stay cold and shut down and let whatever glowing coals in your heart remain die out indefinitely. 

But then I simultaneously ask myself if this is really what life after loss is supposed to be like - a giant, never-ending funeral dirge of sadness that you never get away from that prevents you from ever living a full existence ever again. Do the dying and the dead really want you to give up second chances at happiness just because they left? Does a God of redeeming stories ask us to give up only to withhold all future opportunities of abundant living? 

Maybe life after loss is simply this: learning to sit with the fact that two things can be simultaneously true. That it's possible to grieve the existence of your pain while still affirming the reality that hope is on the horizon. That Grace makes a way for you to thaw out over time, to accept the presence of God and the reality of goodness even as you mourn what you once had and then lost. 

Neglect to bravely put fuel on your soul-fire and step out again following what took a sacred part of you away forever and, like any fire, your warmth will fade and your coldness will settle and your heart will deny that it's possible to ever have a spark ignite it again. In order to go forward with purpose in your pain, in order to discover a different but still meaningful life after loss, you have to find ways to rekindle the dying coals inside yourself. You have to trust that God knows how to restore an aching soul  - that broken spirits and contrite hearts are what He deals in and that nobody but Him knows best how to make them love again. 

Perhaps it's in the tiny choices and the most mundane of moves, but you must keep showing your soul that it doesn't need to morph into some Scrooge who died forever just because life took an unexpected turn. You have to courageously continue to remind yourself that loss doesn't spell the end of us... unless we let it. Someone else's end, while painful, doesn't have to our own and it's possible that we can learn to create a new normal and a fresh beginning even as we remember what ended. 

The fact that I still have a few burning embers within proves I am not completely gone inside forever. I still have the ability to breathe and live and hope and love... just maybe not exactly in the way I did before. Whatever pain I've walked through, whatever grief I've borne, I am still here and I still have the chance to take these shattered pieces and let the Spirit blow some life back into them. Let the One who saw all these things coming and is never surprised prove to me that my heart can still find a home in this beautiful world and the tender souls within it. 

Yes, dear one. Glowing coals can still be raised and because He was once raised, you can be raised too. And resurrection is the ultimate story because all of this, even the hard stuff, is His story and all our stories come together in His tapestry of hope to form a picture of redeeming love, of Grace reviving the dying. 

Come, Lord Jesus, and blow on these coals of my heart. To You, I give this pain. Use it as you will.