Happy 50th

Last night I realized that I only have one day left before I leave to go back to Cincinnati for my mom's 50th birthday. The problem is that for months I have been planning on making a picture slide show for her as a suprise, and I hadn't even started it yet. So, I decided to gather up all the photo albums I stole from home and head over the Young Life office to start putting it together. It took hours just to go through all the pics, not to mention putting them in order to music.

As I was sitting there last night at 2am, I started to get really sad. For the last couple months I have been doing a lot better dealing with the divorce of my parents. I have gone through so many emotions. The screaming and crying and wanting to just run through a wall. The hate, the anger, and the deep sadness of loss. But lately, I have been better able to accept reality. And then last night somehow I started to get lost in the sadness all over again. It rushed over me like wave. I felt like I was standing on the edge of the grand canyon of memories and I just wanted to dive in head first, but to do so would have been the end of me.

As I looked at so many pictures of my parents when they were young, and all the hundreds of stories, and vacations, and good times, and life shared, it was hard to believe that it could really be over. And that is the strange part about the past to me. I often struggle with the idea of past. How can it feel so real and be so completely over at the same time? How can I taste, smell, and even feel things from the past, yet they are always beyond my grasp?

I loved the family that I grew up in. I loved the laughter. I loved making fruit cakes with my dad at christmas. I loved going for walks together in the metro parks. I loved all the funny voices that my mom would make. I loved something that is gone. And now, I need to learn to love something new.

So, I'm trying to make this picture movie celebrating my mom's life, and in the process not use any pictures of my dad. How am I supposed to remove my dad from 30 years of my mom's life? It's like trying to rewrite history. In many ways I guess that's what divorce is. Trying to rewrite history, like trying to detach yourself from your own life. I can't think of anything that sounds too much more painful. It makes me think of Jesus's commands for us. How often do we see them as restrictive and cumbersome. But over and over again Jesus gives them to us out of love. He made our hearts and knows what hurts them the most. Yet again and again we all turn aside thinking our way will be better. Look how far it has got us.