A year ago today my husband presented me with a very long letter, it was the first time in our journey towards healing that he had really sat and poured all of his heart and thoughts out onto paper, collected them all in one spot for me to read. I kept it of course, and I read it again today, 1 year later, I have read it several times actually within this last year, but in all honesty it has been a good 6 months since I have read it. I find it interesting that grieving has a pattern, it takes on the personality of the person who owns it, but it seems that pretty much across the board it has a course that it is destined to fulfill, whether we want to walk that course or not. When I see my sister in law and my step mom grieving the loss of my brother, I have empathy for them, I know what it is like to grieve a loss, and though my husband is still here, I lost him as I once knew him, our life as I once knew it, was skewed, changed, different, gone. Grieving is hard. Grieving brings change. When my brother died I bought a card for my step mom, on the cover was a butterfly with the words "Just when the caterpillar thought his world was ending, he became a butterfly" I see this in our marriage, I thought my world was ending, but God knew he was going to give us wings. Because of the grace of God, there is hope in our grief. We do not grieve as those who have no hope. When I first read the letter my husband gave to me a year ago today, it was too much for me to take in, he presented it to me with tears in his eyes, and he wanted me to know that he loved me, and more than this, that writing this letter out, for him, reminded him that he was in fact
in love with me. I was still deep in hurt and angry, I didn't know if I could or should trust him ever again, today I read the letter with different eyes, and because of Gods grace I read a letter from a man that was broken, and hurting and grieving his sin, and desperately wanted to reconcile the damage he had done, I read a letter from a man who took full ownership of his wrongs and was willing to accept the consequences of his actions and do what ever it took to rebuild my trust, a year later, he still is this man, only God... because of his grace has mended a lot of the brokeness, softened all the hurt, and replaced the grieving with victory. Because of grace, we walk forward, into this journey of metamorphosis, to be changed, to embrace the new "normal" to get our wings...
