A Long Goodbye

Alzheimer's Disease is known as the long goodbye, but sending a kid off to college could give it a run for its money. Mine left a week ago. I feel like we started preparing 18 years ago. The ramping up began in earnest four years ago in high school. Our college visits began the summer before junior year. Then came the PSAT, the ACT, the SAT, and the copious emails from the school counselor's office, all natural triggers for a mother's inborn goodbye reflex. The one she works feverishly to squash.

Senior year. Just one big farewell, capped off with a graduation week that seems to stretch on for all eternity, endless parties (posing as celebrations, but really goodbyes), and perhaps a goodbye family vacation. Summer? More goodbyes. Goodbye, grandmas and grandpas. Goodbye aunts, uncles, cousins, high school friends, and Fargo's Pizza. Last week as the departure date arrived, it was goodbye sisters, goodbye bed, goodbye home. I cried my eyes out in the driveway as my son and my husband started off on their long drive across the country. But oh no, that was not the last goodbye.

I flew out a few days later to meet up with the guys in Virginia. There we had the goodbye hotel night, the goodbye nice dinner, the goodbye Target run. Ninety-six hours of goodbyeing, until I was completely worn out. But then it was Sunday, the Big Goodbye Day. After goodbye church and goodbye Egg McMuffins, we were finally at the end.

Except that we weren't, because there is no end. Goodbyes are an ongoing requirement of parenting. From the moment we leave that baby with grandma for the first time to eek out a two-hour meal between feedings until we're on our death beds, we say one goodbye after another to our children.

They may go against maternal instinct to gather our young and keep them close, but goodbyes don't have to be bad. Goodbyes are actually kind of exciting. (Not to mention a better option than a basement full of unemployed 30-somethings.) There are overwhelming life events like accidents and cancer, fires and floods, that are devastating. But there are overwhelming life events like births, marriages, and new jobs that are beautiful and hopeful. Sending your kid to college is one of these. It feels a little overwhelming to everyone involved, but it's the good kind of overwhelming. Something really hard but really, really good.

I find that if I stay focused on looking forward through the lens of Braden's future instead of backward through the lens of his time with me, I'm practically giddy about this overwhelming life event. (By the way, those words aren't mine. Thankfully there are very wise, eloquent people who have done this before and offer help for the rest of us.) If I discipline my mind to focus on joy and gratitude, there's not nearly so much room for the sadness. I picture it like a big, sludgy pot of emotions. There are about a hundred of them in there, but if I keep stirring, very intentionally, the joy rises to the top and the sadness settles at the bottom.

Yes, there are times when I open the pantry and realize the graham crackers are going to go stale because no one eats them but Braden. There are moments when I put the strawberry milk back in the grocery store cooler because Braden's not here to drink it. There are times when I have to walk into his remarkably clean room to deposit the last pair of straggling socks that didn't make it into the suitcase. That's when I have to stir the pot hard.

It's not that I feel the need to chase the tears away. Tears are a natural part of processing overwhelming life events, and they can be very therapeutic. But I want them to come from a place of joy, gratitude, and hopefulness, not a place of despair.

The past 15 months, and especially the past two weeks, have left me with goodbye fatigue. But they've also given me perspective on what it means to love a child so much that you want what's best for him, regardless of the cost to yourself. I can do this. I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. I can keep letting my children go, keep saying goodbye, keep stirring that pot.

Ambassadors

It's been a rotten week for the church in America. At least the public image of the church. The country's most influential church appears to be falling apart at the seams, rocked by another leadership scandal. Pastors seem every bit as likely as politicians, Hollywood executives, and professional athletes to be called out for their poor behavior. And the state of Pennsylvania has just released the most scathing report ever on the history of child sexual abuse by Catholic priests, with at least 300 priests and more than 1,000 victims identified.

Such a great paradox between what we read in the news and what we read in the Bible. We are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works. We are His ambassadors. God makes His appeal through us. The church is the body of Christ. We bear His very name! And yet we drag it through the mud.

What does it mean to be Christ's ambassadors? It means we represent His kingdom. We show others what it's like, what He's like. And yet we fail at this all the time. Where He is faithful, we are faithless. Where He is kind, we are nasty. Where He is holy, we are just like everyone else.

He's not surprised by any of this. He knew how we'd fail, and yet He still trusted us with the most important of assignments. He put His good news into our hands, and He told us to take it out to a hurting, needy world. It blows my mind. If He had asked me, I would have said, "Oh, no, God. This is a bad idea. These people can't even be trusted to show up to worship on time. They're easily distracted, self-absorbed, messy. They're dust, Lord. Redeemed yes, but still just dust. They'll make a mockery of your great name. Don't entrust this to them."

But I wasn't there. And He knows infinitely more than my little mind can ever hope to grasp. This was the way He chose to make Himself known on the earth--through messed up dust like us--and it is the way that is best. I have to trust Him on that. And I have to believe that whatever harm His people are bringing to His name, even more good is being done. 

In his book Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam reported that Christians are significantly more likely to give money to the homeless, return excess money to a shop clerk, help a sick neighbor, spend time with someone who's depressed, and help someone find a job. People who regularly attend church give four times as much to charity as their secular neighbors. They are twice as likely to volunteer with the poor, the sick, and the elderly. 

These are just the small things. They don't include the Christians who provide loving homes for one foster child after another, who feed, clothe, and welcome refugees, who bring new life to addicts and prisoners. I've not seen many national news stories on Christians who leave the comfort of their western homes to lay pipes for fresh water in El Salvador, to love street children in India, to rescue sex-trafficked girls in Thailand, to teach grown-up orphans in Russia how to be good mothers. Yet these things happen every day. 

We are Christ's ambassadors. We represent His kingdom in our service, our love, our joy, our patience, our perseverance, and our hope. I look at myself, nearly defeated by something as mundane as a couple weeks of plumbing woes, and wonder at God's use of someone like me. He could have chosen angels, and yet He chooses to use regular, flawed people like you and me. His power is perfected in our weakness. His light shines through our frailness. His name rises above the scandal of the week. In all this, He knows what He's doing.