It was a cold and dreary day. Gray skies. Snow had just fallen days before. For most people, it was a normal winter day. For me…it was the day my mother was going to be buried. Fewer than a week earlier, she had passed away and now, I was looking at her casket. A range of emotions ran through me but obviously, the main ones being grief and sadness. In a small moment, as I reached for a rose from the top of her casket, I turned to find a man dressed in a long coat and a hat. A man, that I was almost certain, I had not seen to that point. He made two statements. “God is with you. God will be your salvation.” For a lack of a better response in that moment, I said thank you and walked away. It was as if, the man disappeared after that, and I am entirely sure that I looked around to see if someone else had seen him. But no one else was around.
For the following two years, I managed grief on my own personal timeline. Apologetically, in isolation and with an intense sense of denial. Money was spent, recklessly. I would try to fill moments of grief with objects that would never be equivalent to my mother’s love. Relationships were tried and lost. Friendships were left unattended. Through it all, the mirror became a hard place to look in. As I reached my thirty fourth birthday, I kept having this reoccurring dream. I would be standing in a well-lit auditorium with a crowd of people, and someone would be speaking. Speaking of faith. Speaking of survival. The oddity would be the dream was set sometime in the future and the world had grown darker. I would have the dream numerous times and each time, I would be searching for its meaning. Until one morning, I woke up and had this overwhelming sense that God was trying to send me a message.
For a few months now, I have been waking up every Sunday morning and walking into a church by myself. In the beginning, when my friend first took me, I was still wary of whether I was making the right decision. Never an overly religious person. In and out of faith my whole life. I listed all the way that it was not the right decision, but I kept going. A few weeks ago, an elder pastor walked up to me and asked me what brought me there and what God had been teaching me. My first answer being patience and my second answer being that God led me there. I had been grieving my mother’s passing for so long, in many self-destructing ways and in some ways, I had begun to give up on finding any semblance of peace. But as this pastor prayed with me, that morning, for a long time in an exceedingly long time, I never felt surer of my faith.
In the current state of the world, being a Christian or not being a Christian is a hot button issue. People have strong views on either side. I will not condemn a person for any decision they choose to make but I continually go back to the moment I was standing next to my mother’s casket. The journey has been one full of struggles and tribulations. But I found a way. I like to believe God and my mother worked simultaneously.
