To my Andrew,
Tonight [is another night] at home without you. I see you all over this house, and there are a million little things that I see and remember that completely break my heart. I see you in the garage working out. I see you in the bed taking a nap. I see you in the kitchen drinking a protein shake. I see you at night sneaking Ben & Jerry’s from the freezer. I see you in your office, quietly, confidently typing away, crafting another powerful message for Sunday.
The boys see you too. They see you outside doing yard work. They see you with your hammer and drill hanging things on the walls. They see you sitting on the couch watching a movie with them. They see you in the bed in the morning when they walk in to wake me up. They see you in the driveway picking weeds. They see you in our closet getting ready for work.
I don’t know how to not see you here. You are a part of me. You are a part of our children. A special, important part. Life without you feels hopeless and heavy. I have countless unanswered questions, numerous broken dreams, and a myriad of shattered plans. The change feels painfully unnatural. I don’t want the change; I just want you here with me. I want things to go back to the way they were before.
On the day I broke the news to the boys, Smith and I spent some time drawing together in a coloring book titled When Someone I Love Dies. It is a strange forced feeling to be discussing death with a 5, 4, and 2-year-old. I can see Smith’s brain working tirelessly just like mine, attempting to wrap his young mind around this new reality.
Something unexpected that has been helping us this week is butterflies. You would probably laugh and make fun of us, but we can’t seem to escape them. The first few pages of our new coloring book examined change. The book instructed us to draw an egg, a caterpillar, a cocoon, and then a butterfly. It was a simple way for a 5-year-old to understand that life is ever evolving, ever changing.
Just a few hours after we finished coloring, I went to close the curtains in the family room. To my surprise there was a tiny green caterpillar attached to the top part of the curtain. What is a caterpillar doing in our house? How did it crawl up so high on the curtain? The door has been closed all day; how did it end up there? Usually, I would have squealed and run away, but I was so stunned that I picked it up and showed the boys. Without skipping a beat Smith told me, “It’s a miracle from God.”
Smith, in his childlike faith, believed God sent us the precious little caterpillar to remind us that He is near. He is in the details. He is connected and He cares. I agreed with Smith, and we both cried over that little caterpillar. We quickly found a jar and some leaves and now we are taking great care of our new pet whom Smith named “Little Buddy.” We now get to sit back and watch Little Buddy evolve and change before our eyes. . . .
In the midst of my quiet time this morning the image of a butterfly jumped out at me from a book. In the book [Through the Eyes of a Lion], the author [Levi Lusko] says, “I started to think a lot about butterflies and how if you cut them out of their cocoons or help them out in any way, they will never develop the strength they need in their wings to be able to achieve takeoff. They have to struggle out in order to come into their own. Flight only comes after the fight.”1
Right now I feel like a caterpillar trapped in a dark cocoon. It feels like a full-on battle, a full-fledged war. I didn’t choose this. I don’t want this. I just want to be a caterpillar again. I don’t want to be wrapped up in grief and pain, I don’t want to walk through this. I don’t want to be smothered by anxious thoughts about my future and the future of our children. I want this all to go away so I can be free again.
Today I am reminded that although I hate it, God has me right where I need to be. I can feel Him wrapping His loving arms around me. I am fighting it, kicking and screaming, but I can feel the Holy Spirit infusing me with His strength. I can feel God protecting me and holding me close. I can feel the safety and security in my own little cocoon. It may take years until I am ready to fly, but I know that the fight won’t last forever. One day, God will release me from the darkness and despair. He will show me a life of hope and a future full of purpose. I will no longer be a carefree caterpillar. I will emerge a new creation, a beautiful butterfly, and I will soar to even greater heights. I can’t see any of it now in my dark, clouded cocoon, but I know that I am safe. He’s got me right where I need to be, and He has great plans for my life and the life of our boys.
“‘For I know the plans I have for you,’ declares the LORD, ‘plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future’” (Jer. 29:11).
I miss you, Andrew, I miss you so much. I love you,
Your Girl2
Caterpillars and butterflies. I never knew how much I could relate to something that I counted insignificant before Andrew’s death. Sure, I had noticed a butterfly fluttering through the air and for a moment thought it beautiful, but there was never a caterpillar that stopped me in my tracks—not until the day a “miracle from God” came so clearly in the form of a tiny green caterpillar.
It meant everything.
It was a miracle.
It was a promise from God.
A reminder he is real, he hears our cries, he sees our pain, he cares about every intricate detail of our lives, and he isn’t far but near. A reminder that miracles come in all shapes and sizes and life itself is one beautiful miracle. Breathing in and out, the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tastes of this one life—it’s all a gift.
When we lose someone we love, it changes the way we see the world. When Andrew died, I began to notice things I hadn’t noticed before. I began to look for little glimpses, little miracles, little kisses from heaven everywhere. The clouds in the sky, the sunset in the evening, and the waves crashing at the beach all stirred new awe and wonder in my soul. A childlike faith awakened deep inside, and for months I spent my days searching everywhere for signs of heaven, of Andrew, of something more, of something beyond this place. While driving, I would pull over to the side of the road just to stare at the sky. I would play with my kids in the backyard and completely lose myself in the beauty of the dwindling daylight. I would sit on my paddleboard in the ocean and imagine Andrew sitting on the perfect shores of eternity.
Andrew and I were one. We had a deep soul connection. When he left this place, he took half of my heart with him, and it changed me. My old life died. What once was one had torn in two, and in the tearing, God was preparing a new heart for me. This was an intricate open-heart surgery, and the recovery would take years. I often wondered if my heart would ever find its rhythm again.
The fear that had crept into Andrew’s mind and torn our world apart led me to a new wilderness. A new life, a new terrain to navigate, far away from what I knew to be home. Andrew was my home. Now I felt like a wanderer, forced to build a new home in a foreign land. A new heart, a new home, a new life. And this new life was graced with a new calling. I knew it, I felt it, God made it very clear—my pain would not be wasted. There would be a wellspring in the wilderness, new life in a desolate place.
A wellspring is a beginning, a source, a root, a fountainhead through which life overflows. The immediate, overwhelming, punch-in-the-gut pain of loss couldn’t be a wellspring, could it? A wellspring is a source of life, and death signifies the end of life; they couldn’t be more opposite. Like joy and sorrow, you couldn’t have both at the same time—could you?
If I have learned anything from the trenches of loss, it’s that nothing makes sense. Everything is upside down and backward, and emotions are scattered all over the place. How you expect to feel isn’t how you actually feel, and how you actually feel isn’t how you want to feel at all. I have also learned joy and sorrow can coexist, and there are springs and streams to be found on the desolate plains of pain.
It’s a pressing, crushing, transforming process, being thrust into a new life, a new calling, a new world. It has the potential to destroy us completely or change us deeply. Like the caterpillar, we may have never asked to become a butterfly. Maybe we were happy with our life the way it was. We didn’t ask to soar to greater heights or to live a life of greater calling or to be given deeper beauty.
Even though life wasn’t always easy, I was happy with the way things were. I was happy with where Andrew and I were headed. I loved my life. If you had asked me where I saw myself in twenty years, I would have confidently answered like this: “Living in the same beautiful house, serving at the same beautiful church, married to the same beautiful man, and raising the same beautiful boys.” That’s all I wanted. I had all I could ever ask for and more. I wasn’t looking for a new life.
But life is always changing, always evolving, always shifting, always moving, and if I have learned anything through this process, it’s that control is just an illusion, a façade. Life isn’t predictable; it’s unpredictable. The plans we make aren’t set in stone; instead they are like putty in God’s hands. He takes the caterpillar and transforms it into a beautiful butterfly. It isn’t the caterpillar’s decision, but his. In the lifecycle of a caterpillar, this is called the transition stage. This stage can last a few weeks up to a few years depending on the species. All of the work in the transition phase takes place inside the chrysalis.3 On the outside it may appear as though nothing is happening; the naked eye is blind to the process taking place inside. It’s intimate work, intricate work, important work: a Creator and his creation working it out together.
Just as the transition stage is necessary for the caterpillar to become a butterfly, it is also a necessary step in grief. Loss beckons each of us to curl up for a while and rest in our own little chrysalis. Just as our grief is unique, our chrysalis is too. Maybe your chrysalis is sitting on the couch with a soft blanket and a Bible. Or maybe it’s sitting down for coffee with a friend. Or maybe it’s sitting with a box of tissues in the counselor’s office. Or snuggling up in your bed and resting your body. For me it’s been all of the above; the grief has followed me everywhere. I have been wrapped up in the pain no matter where I go.
The Journey of Grief
One place I have found rest and intimate connection with God is at the beach. Everything about the beach is healing to my soul. Almost weekly I find myself out on the water on a paddleboard. In a season where I don’t know who I am anymore, where I feel numb and empty, something about being out on the water reminds me I’m alive. The wind in my face, the cold salty sea splashing all around, my muscles being pushed to the limit as I paddle—these things are life-giving to me. The experience is grounding, and it reminds me to feel again: to feel connected here on earth, to feel the presence of God, and to feel the pull of heaven.
As I sit on the water, I often find myself wondering about heaven.
Can Andrew experience what I am experiencing?
Is there an ocean in heaven?
Is there paddleboarding in heaven?
What is he doing right now?
What does it feel like?
Although I can only imagine what Andrew is experiencing in heaven, I do have the gift of what he left behind. Because Andrew was a pastor, he left us with a powerful, incredible, beautiful gift: his messages. Anytime I am overwhelmed with missing him, I can see him, hear him, and learn from him. These messages are healing right here and now, but they will also be an irreplaceable source of comfort for my boys as they grow and mature. When their memories start to fade and they have questions about their daddy, I can open up a message and press play. His humor, his mannerisms, his gifts, and his calling can all be on display with the click of a button. What a blessing.
There is one message in particular I replay often. It’s a message Andrew gave on grief during a church-wide study on endurance.4 Through the Endurance message series, Andrew taught our church how to withstand various trials in life. During his third sermon on the topic, Andrew addressed how to endure grief well. Every time I play this message, tears stream down my face. I remember sitting in the front row and watching Andrew give this message live, and now through his message he is teaching me how to grieve his death.
As I listen to his message, I am reminded that grief is part of life. It will hit all of us at some point. Some of us are on the front end of grief, and we are sitting in shock. Some of us are in the middle of grief, and we still feel numb. Some of us are on the back side of grief, and we’ve discovered that just because we move forward doesn’t mean we move on; the grief will always be there. No matter where we find ourselves on the grief journey, here are a few truths about grief.
GRIEF IS UNAVOIDABLE
The consequence of love is grief. Every time we choose to love, we choose to grieve. True love means giving a part of ourselves away, and it is not easily retrieved. If we love someone or something we will grieve. If we ascribe value to someone or something we will grieve. If we’ve given our heart to someone or something we will grieve. Jesus said, “Very truly I tell you, you will weep and mourn while the world rejoices. You will grieve” (John 16:20).
GRIEF IS PAINFUL
It is difficult, impossible even, to accurately describe the pain of grief, but we try. C. S. Lewis described grief’s all-encompassing power as “like the sky, spread over everything.”5 It is painful and lonely, isolating and torturous. Grief changes us, transforms us, and gives us new eyes to see everything. We learn to navigate our new normal through living with the pain. It’s a pain we may carry for the rest of our lives. At first the pain may feel huge and overwhelming, but over time, as we heal, it can grow smaller.
I recently came across an analogy for grief, and it resonated deeply with me. It describes grief as a ball in a box. Also inside the box is a button. The box is our life, the ball is our grief, and the button is our pain. When the grief hits initially, it’s so big and so overwhelming that every time we move the box rattles, and the ball taps the button relentlessly. However, over time the ball of grief begins to shrink on its own. As we live and move and breathe the grief still rattles around inside, but because it has gotten smaller, it hits the pain button less often. As time passes and we seek healing for our grief, the ball continues to shrink. It rarely hits the pain button. We may be able to make it through a day or even an entire week without feeling the intensity of the pain. But when it does hit, the pain is just as strong as it was the first time we felt it. It’s just as hard to understand.6 We may never be fully released from the pain this side of heaven, but maybe, as we learn to live with the grief, it will grow a little smaller—one day at a time.
GRIEF IS TEMPORAL
“Now is your time of grief, but I will see you again and you will rejoice, and no one will take away your joy” (John 16:22). When the pain is overwhelming, we can choose to lose heart, or we can choose to remember our joy is truly anchored. My joy is not anchored in Andrew, my joy is not anchored in my children, and my joy is not anchored in my future. The only safe, sacred place where I can find unconditional love and securely anchor my joy is with God. No matter what kind of grief we are facing, we don’t have to face it alone. We can choose to invite God’s supernatural peace, joy, and love into our pain. When we do, maybe we will discover that, although the pain we feel now is temporal, joy is eternal.
I love these encouraging words from Jesus: “I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world” (v. 33). We will grieve, but we will also live, and to live is the miracle. Whether we have eyes to see them or not, miracles surround us. As God gave me new vision through pain, I began to notice evidence of his miracle work everywhere. I was so blown away by the presence and provision of God that I started making a list of the miracles I saw so I would never forget all the incredible work he’s done. These are small and large reminders that the God we serve is intimate and intentional. I knew God was real before Andrew died, but the way he showed up so clearly after Andrew’s death only bolstered my faith. I cried over the loss of my husband, but I also shed tears over the pure goodness of God.
The Wilderness
After Jesus’ time in the wilderness, he went on to perform his first miracle. I find this truly fascinating. It parallels so intimately with my story. When we were in our wilderness season with Andrew’s mental illness, we were begging God for a miracle. I will never forget sitting at our favorite lifeguard tower, Tower 52 in Newport Beach, huddled up in the sand together, begging God to lift the darkness and heal Andrew completely. But God didn’t show up the way we wanted him to. The truth is, he actually allowed the dark, confusing wilderness season to continue. And ultimately, he allowed Andrew to die. But as soon as Andrew left our lives, God was everywhere, in everything, all of the time. I was surrounded by his mighty presence, and it was beautiful and sacred yet also frustrating and confusing.
We have all had our fair share of wilderness seasons, haven’t we? Seasons where we are begging God to show up, but it feels like he is ignoring us completely. Why does God sometimes go silent? Why does he sometimes wait until after the wilderness to allow the miracles? I don’t know the answer, and I don’t know if I will ever know why this side of heaven. The unanswerable why question is the mystery of God, the mystery of faith. I wrestle with the why all the time. Why Andrew? Why me? Why our family? Why now?
When I have exhausted myself with the why, I sit in surrender, releasing the why back to him and acknowledging, “There’s nothing I can do.” I’m sure most of us wish the hard, terrible thing would just go away and God wouldn’t ask so much of us. If we could write the script of our lives, we would skip past the ugly and uncomfortable and fast-forward to the good, the happy, the easy. But there is something sacred about showing up to fight for our story. It’s in the fight that God stitches our one broken heart back together with new strength, new power, new peace. In every unseen moment he is carefully guiding the needle and the thread. And with each slow stitch we discover a hidden truth: healing is hard and holy, beautiful and painful, all at the same time.
As I sit in the slow, grueling process of grief, I am learning to breathe again. It’s an everyday exhale, an everyday letting go, an everyday crying out, an everyday release of what was. I have no choice after I exhale but to inhale. To inhale: new hope, new peace, new truth, new joy—new life.
I am learning that God doesn’t work in my timeline, so I must surrender to his. When we are in a season of waiting, instead of trying to fast-forward the process, maybe we can pray this simple prayer of surrender: “God, make me what I should be in the midst of my affliction, and help me to learn how to live here for as long as it may last.”7 Every day in the wilderness, our souls are developing the patient endurance that can only come from deep discomfort. By drawing near to the presence of God, we are able to show up to our present reality.
I love how Paul described the patient endurance of waiting on God. He wrote, “But that’s not all! Even in times of trouble we have a joyful confidence, knowing that our pressures will develop in us patient endurance. And patient endurance will refine our character, and proven character leads us back to hope. And this hope is not a disappointing fantasy, because we can now experience the endless love of God cascading into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who lives in us!” (Rom. 5:3–5 TPT).
The pain and pressures of life develop endurance. Endurance refines us as it slowly shapes and transforms us into something new. After Jesus endured the wilderness, he went on to create something new too—out of nothing he created something. His first miracle: new wine. I love this story because it is such a beautiful picture of what God can do in and through our pain. God wants to make new wine in all of us. He wants to bring us from the wilderness to the promise.
Three days later there was a wedding in the village of Cana in Galilee. Jesus’ mother was there. Jesus and his disciples were guests also. When they started running low on wine at the wedding banquet, Jesus’ mother told him, “They’re just about out of wine.”
Jesus said, “Is that any of our business, Mother—yours or mine? This isn’t my time. Don’t push me.”
She went ahead anyway, telling the servants, “Whatever he tells you, do it.”
Six stoneware water pots were there, used by the Jews for ritual washings. Each held twenty to thirty gallons. Jesus ordered the servants, “Fill the pots with water.” And they filled them to the brim.
“Now fill your pitchers and take them to the host,” Jesus said, and they did.
When the host tasted the water that had become wine (he didn’t know what had just happened but the servants, of course, knew), he called out to the bridegroom, “Everybody I know begins with their finest wines and after the guests have had their fill brings in the cheap stuff. But you’ve saved the best till now!”
This act in Cana of Galilee was the first sign Jesus gave, the first glimpse of his glory. And his disciples believed in him. (John 2:1–11 THE MESSAGE)
This story is about a sign: the old is gone, and the new has come. The wine was a symbol, a sacred act, a sacred moment. It indicated the kingdom of God had arrived. It was the beginning of new miracles, new signs and wonders, and a new redemption story being written through the life and ministry of Jesus, the one who came to save us all forever. Jesus didn’t just make any wine; he made the best wine, and he made it in abundance.
How symbolic is this for our own lives, for our own wilderness seasons? God doesn’t just want to make new wine in us; he wants to make the best wine. When we open the door to our heart and invite him into our most vulnerable, sacred space, he is able to give us new, abundant life. I love these words from Paul’s prayer at the end of his letter to the Ephesians: “Now to him who is able to do far more abundantly than all that we ask or think, according to the power at work within us” (Eph. 3:20 ESV). When we plant our feet firmly in God’s gentle, unfailing love, we can experience abundant life—even in our deepest pain.
I have found this to be true in my grief journey as I have encountered God’s abundant love over and over again. One of these abundant love encounters happened to be an invitation for the boys and me to travel to Israel. The trip itself was a gift, but God also orchestrated every detail. The trip fell on my thirtieth birthday and on Father’s Day, our first Father’s Day without Andrew. I don’t think it’s a coincidence we just so happened to be in Israel that week. And I don’t think it was by chance that on Father’s Day we had the opportunity to be baptized in the Jordan River, the same place where Jesus declared his love for his Father. The last place Jesus stood before his wilderness journey. It wasn’t a coincidence; it was a beautiful gift. God knew Father’s Day would hurt, and he wanted it to be different. Not because we’re special or because we deserve it at all, but because the love he offers is abundant, above and beyond anything we could ever dream up on our own.
So, on Father’s Day we threw on some baggy white robes and walked hand in hand into the water to receive the gift of redemption. It was my absolute honor to baptize my sons, Smith and Jethro, to the Father on Father’s Day. The Father who loves them more than Andrew ever could. The Father who knew them before they were born and will be with them wherever they go. The Father they can always count on no matter what life throws their way. I am so grateful for the gift we received that day, a powerful new Father’s Day memory.
We will walk through pain in this life, but we will never walk alone. We serve a God who wants to be invited in and desires nothing more than to write a new redemption story in and through our pain. “To the fatherless he is a father. To the widow he is a champion friend. To the lonely he makes them part of a family. To the prisoners he leads into prosperity until they sing for joy. This is our Holy God in his Holy Place!” (Ps. 68:5 TPT).