leaving.

I sit here with the fall breeze on my face and look around our apartment and my mind races a mile a minute.  What can we fit in our seven suitcases?  What needs to be left behind?

Already I feel the loss of the dark blue dishes we were given for our wedding and our patchwork assortment of coffee mugs and Judah’s little crayon-streaked toddler bed.

My heart aches over saying good-bye to the church family that I have known and loved for seven years, and the thought of starting over from scratch in a brand new church.

My stomach tightens with dread when I think ahead to how I am going to feel on December 25th, 2010, on the first Christmas in my entire life spent without one of my two families.

When I make myself stop in the midst of all this busyness of sorting and packing and rushing to doctor’s appointments, I find that there is a huge, gaping hole in my heart that seems to widen by the day, with each fresh reminder of what and who we are leaving behind.

The other night I found myself suddenly crying as I told a friend that we can’t take Judah’s beloved Thomas the Tank Engine train table with us to South Asia.  Even now, as I write this fact, I can hardly see the computer screen for the blur of tears over this very simple thing.

It is hard to be still right now, because when I do it, the pain threatens to take over.

But – and I never expected this – there is hope in the pain.  Because I think that this is the first time in my life I’ve actually let myself be still.  Here we are, six weeks from boarding a plane and moving far away, and I am not ignoring the pain, or trying to move through it as fast as possible, or to only look on the bright side.  I can sit in this suffering and tell God about it and not need to jump up and busy myself or surf the Internet or pick up a book.

God is giving me peace in this grief, even when sometimes I feel like I won’t be able to breathe if I think about it any longer.  Even when I lay wakeful in the dark and beg him to please, please take this cup from me.

His grace comes in simple forms.  It comes in the form of a husband who lets me cry when I want to, or lets me sit in silence with him when I don’t feel like crying.  It comes in the form of dear friends who let me talk about how I feel, and who talk to me about their own pain over us leaving.  They don’t realize it, but their doing that gives me the courage to face my own pain.  It comes in the form of friends already living in the place we are moving to, who are looking their own losses full in the face even now, and who understand as well as anyone on this earth what I am going through.

These days so much feels impermanent and unknown and tinged with sadness, and so far, the thing I know is that God’s grace is enough.  Right now, that is all I need.