Category Archives: Widowhood

When Dark Is Light

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Each part of a church service has a special significance, but the children’s sermon is one of my favorites.

On a recent Sunday, our pastor was doing a good job describing Jesus as the Light of the world when one of the children, age four, raised his hand. Having just heard all about the Light, he felt it was important to add something. “My favorite color is dark.”

Most pastors are good at handling this kind of spontaneity, especially when it comes from a child. After acknowledging the comment, Pastor Jay smoothly moved his words from darkness back to light.

That afternoon at home I was still chuckling over the morning’s comment when I remembered our first grandchild, Skylar, who would have appreciated that unprompted addition to the children’s sermon.

When she was only three (left), her Auntie Weezi asked her a question most kids love to answer. “Sky, what’s your favorite color?”

Skylar answered without even looking up. “Black.”

Most little girls are into pink and purple, but each child is allowed to have their own favorite. Skylar’s unusual choice gave us all a good giggle that day.

My next-door-neighbor, Linda, told me that when she was a child walking home in the dark, she was never afraid. Instead she looked into the inky blackness around her and thought about the interesting things that might be hidden in the darkness – good things. She probably would have nodded in agreement to the favorites of dark and black.

Some of my widowed friends (including me) have experienced the opposite perspective on darkness. After becoming widows, we might find our imaginations allowing fear to creep in, uninvited. This is when we need to turn to God to get his opinion. He created darkness as well as light and surely isn’t biased against either one.

His explanation to me has been that the black of night is not the problem. Rather it’s the fear. And fear is never, he says, from him. It’s a tool of the devil who uses it to knock us off balance emotionally. God tells us there’s no darkness in him at all (1 John 1:5) and that he’s not afraid of it. As a matter of fact, darkness looks light to him (Psalm 139:12). The only darkness that should concern us is spiritual darkness – not knowing the truth of salvation.

As for fearing the black of night, it might help to spend more time hanging around those youngsters who love both black and dark.

“For you are my lamp, O Lord, and the Lord will lighten my darkness.” (2 Samuel 22:29)

A Widow’s Need

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All this week my thoughts have taken up residence down the street with my newly-widowed neighbor, Betty. She has begun her adjustment to life as a no-longer-married woman and realizes it’ll be a change unequalled by any other in her life.

Thankfully she knows many women who’ve already walked this route, myself included, and we are ready, willing, and able to hold her as close as needed.

As I’ve prayed for Betty, my mind has been flooded with examples from my early days of widowhood when God let me see him afresh. Though I ‘d loved him dearly before Nate died, I came to love him more personally afterwards.

The closetIn particular I remember a morning standing in front of my closet, trying to decide what to wear. Looking back and forth across the hanging clothes, I felt powerless to choose. I’d been bombarded with decisions for a couple of weeks, some small, some large, and hadn’t done very well in making any of them.

Friends and family had moved in to assist, but choosing an outfit that morning was all up to me. I felt sad and very much alone standing in front of my closet and asked myself if I should just go back to bed. I could keep my ‘jammies on and escape the clothing decision altogether.

Starting to weep, I knew the only thing to do was pray, and the only prayer that came to mind was, “Help me, God.” I’d prayed that prayer a thousand times in my few weeks as a widow, but never over choosing clothes.

Such a request seemed beneath God, but I had no other option. “Lord, what should I wear?” And then I just stood there, not expecting him to answer me.

Suddenly my eyes fell on a shirt I hadn’t “seen” in a while, and as I stared at it without moving, God put a thought into my head. “How about that one? It would go good with those pants over there, and why don’t you add that sweatshirt from the shelf above?”

Most people would laugh at this, since praying that way seems like a dumbing-down of our almighty God. But after a wife has leaned on a husband for decades, her first dilemma is wondering how she’ll stay standing without him. That’s the moment when God offers to be her supportive other-half.  He is practical, knowing each need and delivering flawless advice to any widow who wants it.

That’s why, when I dressed in the clothes God chose for me that day, I knew no crisis would be too small for his involvement. And because he was willing to choose my clothes back then, I know he’ll answer Betty’s needs in the weeks and months ahead, no matter how large…. or small.

“The widow who is really in need….  continues night and day to pray and to ask God for help.” (1 Timothy 5:5)

Labor and Delivery

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Most of my writing is done in the smallest room in our house. We lightheartedly call it “the library” because there are book shelves in there, but that’s a stretch.

Once in a while, though, I’ve labeled this room something else: our womb-room.

IMG_2645It’s where Nate’s hospital bed was set up during his short-lived struggle with cancer, and we kept it as quiet and safe as possible. He and I retreated there each evening, closing the small French doors behind us, to talk in low tones about important stuff.

As Nate’s need for sleep increased, he spent less time in his living room recliner and more on his bed in this room, drifting into sleep earlier each evening. As he slept, I still sat next to him, aware that each day was bringing us closer to death’s separation.

I often thought about what Nate’s doctor had told me privately: “Birth and death are both messy.” Both also require some hard labor.

A baby’s birth forces him from a dark, warm, safe environment to the bright lights, cold air, and sharp noises outside the womb. And from a baby’s perspective, life after birth isn’t all that safe, starting with his first scrubbing in the hospital nursery.

Dying has its parallels. Nate’s physical death was an exit from a womb, too, our small womb-room, with its peaceful, dimly-lit atmosphere. Just like a baby’s birth requires arduous labor accompanied by pain, Nate’s transition was laborious, too, a regimen of pain caused by disease.

These days the hospital bed is long gone, and as I sit and write in our little womb-room, I often think through the details of what went on here in the fall of 2009. I recall everything Nate went through, thankful to know that what we witnessed wasn’t as much a transition from life to death as a transition from life-with-limits to life-unlimited.

As physical birth brings great joy to a mother and father (and a smile to a baby’s face eventually), being born to eternal life is far more spectacular than that!

It means delivery from suffering of all kinds and a reunion with those we love who have preceded us there. It means the disappearance of any deficiencies and the start-up of abilities we can’t even imagine. And it means the end of all negative emotions, the uptick of all positive ones.

Best of all, though, it means talking and walking with Jesus Christ himself, along with the satisfaction of finally seeing what he looks like. It means watching his facial expressions, listening to his tone of voice, understanding his words, and feeling his touch.

I can’t imagine any labor and delivery with a better end-result than all that.

“If you remain faithful even when facing death, I will give you the crown of life.” (Revelation 2:10)