on missing.

Our friends, John and Alison and Joshua and Caleb, are in North Carolina, saying their last good-byes and getting ready to board a plane to move to South Asia.  A shiver courses through me as I think back on our own good-byes and leave-taking, just about this time last year.

It is one of those experiences (both the leaving and the arriving) I look back on and think, How we did survive it?  Yet, when we were living it, God’s grace was enough.  Of course.  But I surely don’t want to ever go back.

When we left home, the grief just filled me up until I thought there wasn’t room for anything else.  Everything made me cry: a familiar song, a memory, a grainy, smiling face on Skype.  I enjoyed meeting the new people in our new life, but they did little to fill that gaping empty space in my heart.

Part of this year has been, very simply, about learning to live with this new grief.  To “keep it company,” to borrow a line from The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.  To somehow be at ease with the missing becoming apart of me, but at the same time to not let it take over and keep me from living.

A cousin got married this weekend and a part of my family gathered in Columbia for the celebration.  They thought of us—I got a phone call and an email telling me all the little details I crave, telling me that we were missed.  And my heart was heavy with the loss of another momentous family occasion, of the pictures our faces were left out of, of the laughter and the food and the new memories we didn’t get to help make.

It’s been ten months.  The hurt in our hearts is slowly easing as we find new friends and new memories.  But it won’t ever really go away.  And I don’t want it to.  I am very, very grateful for so many people to miss.  For the love that I’m learning can stretch across oceans, and can grow, rather than shrink, when all of us have the peace of knowing we’re right where God wants us.

That is a gift.