Love and Pain

So I wrote this a few weeks ago.......but didn't have internet. It's a little late, but better than never :-) I woke up this morning at 3am. Tried for an hour to go back to sleep, but I finally gave up and so while I'm passing the time waiting for everyone else to wake up I guess I might as well catch up on my blogging! We're moving into our new apartment today and I am so excited! I can't wait to get going! It seems like such a long time since we've been "home" and settled.

We had a wonderful 6 weeks in the states. It was refreshing, encouraging, and even a bit relaxing :-) Being with the people we love there, both family and friends, was great! We stayed primarily at my parents house, where the live with my grandmother. That house has lots of great memories for me from my childhood on up. I always loved visiting my grandparents and playing there. It was so fun to spend the summer watching my kids enjoy this home that has always held so much joy for me. My sister, her husband, and my adorable niece would come almost every day to play. My parents love having us and spend every minute they can on the floor surrounded by their grandkids. We loved every minute of the time we spent together. My parents stock there house with toys so it is like Toys R Us every day. My kids are surrounded by toys and love. Life couldn't get much better for them.

In addition to all of that we have a wonderful group of friends living there who refresh us deeply. They are always like a cold drink of water to our thirsty hearts when we come back to visit. They laugh with us, and cry with us, and we watch as our crazy group of children run circles around us all the while. They provide deep and lasting friendship for us and our children. We couldn't ask for a better bunch of people to raise our family with and share our hearts with.

And if that wasn't enough we got to travel around and catch up with family and friends in different parts of the country. We ended the summer feeling very loved.

Of course that brought us to our very least favorite part of the summer.....saying goodbye. I dread that last week of the summer like nothing else in life. Saying goodbye to these people who hold our hearts is like driving a knife in deep to our souls and twisting it. The pain sometimes feels a bit unbearable. It makes me want to push the off switch to my heart, to shut off the emotions, and never let someone inside so deeply again. This time even Robbie was old enough to feel the gravity of saying goodbye for 2 years. He cried quite a bit and as I comforted him and searched for the words to say, I was reminded of simple truth. Love hurts. To allow someone into your heart is to open yourself up to both immeasurable pain and immeasurable joy. Giving and recieving love is a wonderful thing. It fills your heart with deep joy and opens up your world to beauty. But inevitably it also opens up your heart to pain because the people you love to not belong to you. You cannot keep them or control them, so you also find yourself in painful situations where intentional or unintentional hurts are created and goodbyes are unavoidable. The question then becomes; is the pain worth the joy? The answer of course is yes.

Although our goodbyes are deeply painful to us, the love we experienced all summer long far outweighs the pain. We spent 6 weeks loving and being deeply loved. And that 6 weeks of joy in our lives makes the months of separation worthwhile. We experience more love in those weeks then many people do in their entire lifetimes. Our hearts were opened wide and we loved deeply and so we feel the separation equally deeply. So with a full heart and teary eyes I try to express in simple words this truth to my son. We ache now, but we only ache because we are loved so deeply. We are blessed immensely experience that love and we must not ever be afraid of the pain that comes with it. They go hand in hand and they are what being alive is all about. The greatest love we could ever know, the love of our God, cost Him the greatest pain immaginable. He thought it was worth it, and in a much smaller way so do we. We were created to love and be loved. It will be both beautiful and heartbreaking until we are finally at our forever home.

Comments

  1. EstherSeptember 5, 2011 at 10:59 PM

    Beautiful truth. I am so glad you shared this. Praying for you.

    ReplyDelete

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