Choosing life

I read that passage from Deuteronomy today: I have set before you life and death. Choose life! And that is what I need to do each moment of each day.

This is hard on the days when it's grey and raining - again. It's hard when I am weighed down by grief and overwhelmed by the duties, tasks, responsibilities and burdens I am now carrying. But somehow, God is giving me the daily grace to choose life, one day at a time.

At the same time, I am fully aware that my husband was unable to choose life in that horrible moment before he took his life. He couldn't choose life in the time that it took his body to die. He had made another, awful choice.

But I was reminded by a friend that I must not colour his whole life by that moment. I knew that. I just needed a reminder.

God has been speaking to me about this. I need to choose life. In time, I will. For now, I am walking in the valley of the shadow of death.

Life is a process. We are born, and we gradually grow, mature and experience many things. We process through life. Life does not just happen to us randomly. God uses many experiences to discipline us, to correct us, to bless us and to redeem us.

Never can I believe that God inflicts anything upon us. That is not His character. He is giving life in the midst of death, all the time. He has the greater power to give and take life. No enemy can overcome death beyond God.

In time I will come to see my husband's suicide as death after battling an illness. In time the trauma will ebb and I will be able to remember him with joy again. But it is not now. Not yet.

For now, I choose life in this moment, even though this moment is full of tears. God will redeem and renew me. He cannot restore because my husband is gone, and my life has changed forever (that's not drama, that's the truth).

I choose life even though it hurts to live. God told me how my body weighs me down. Sin weighs me down. In heaven I will be free of this terrible weight, period cramps, headaches, sadness, heaviness, despair, lies, anger and anguish. It will all be gone. I won't care about this stuff any more because it won't have a hold on me any longer. I will be gloriously free!

Today I will choose life because to choose death is too frightening. I am aware that it would release me from this world, but what would it leave? Two children who need me, even as they resist me. Family and friends who love me. I am bound to my life, hating it all the while, and wishing I was back in time.

And my children must choose life too. They have been offered a new life, but it's not the life they were born to with the family they were born to. It is a happy ending to a sad story.

Yet, the ending has not yet been written. Every day they make the choice to belong to this family or to resist, fight and argue their way around and through what they wish they were not forced to accept. I wish, too, that their birth mother could have been able to look after them and to provide for them. But she couldn't. She didn't. And they must now choose this life or not.

Lord, I choose you in this life I did not choose. Please hold me in your hand and bear me up. Please hold my burdens and carry them. Please give me the grace to stay with you rather than trying to walk and run and be in this world on my own without you.

Nothing can make up for the absence of someone whom we love, and it would be wrong to try to find a substitute; we must simply hold out and see it through. That sounds very hard at first, but at the same time it is a great consolation, for the gap, as long as it remains unfilled, preserves the bonds between us. It is nonsense to say that God fills the gap; God doesn't fill it, but on the contrary, keeps it empty and so helps us to keep alive our former communion with each other, even at the cost of pain. DIETRICH BONHOEFFER

Death is always in the process of incubating new life, even when one's existence has been cut down to the bones. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTES

Birth is not one act; it is a process. The aim of life is to be fully born, though its tragedy is that most of us die before we are thus born. To live is to be born every minute. Death occurs when birth stops. ERICH FROMM