Do we believe or not?

Do we believe or not?  Can we trust that God means what He says when He tells us that "our times" are in His hands?  Do we have the courage to suffer and yet be thankful?

I'm asking myself these questions today as I think and pray for people I love who are going through the hardest experiences of our earthly life - letting go of a parent or a child.

In this finite life, there will be partings.  Just as sure as we are born, we will all die; when someone we love dies, it is as though our flesh were being torn, gaping, bleeding wounds left behind.

What I am finding is that, with HD, this parting is a drawing and quartering of a life, of everyone's life.   The tear is not quick, like a bandage being ripped from delicate skin.  It is a long stretching, tearing, and separating of flesh, bone, and joints.  It is a slow death march to the inevitable.

While I am thankful that we still have Lacy, and that glimpses of the bright, engaged young man we knew emerges now and then, it is the loss that I can't let myself feel.  Looking too hard at what has changed so much - what we have lost and will never regain - this is what is unbearable.

People ask me how Lacy is doing, and I say he is doing well.   His health has been stable, he is actually in better spirits lately, but everything has changed.

I watched the movie "Alive and Well" a few weeks ago, with all it's horrors and pain, and I felt nothing.  To engage - to really know what is ahead - is too much.  This disconnection from feeling makes me feel disconnected from God.

Here's the truth that I know, even when I don't feel.  God has not let go of me, nor has He moved.  I am reminded of this when I hear Lacy sing worship songs to lull himself to sleep.  God is with him and beside him all the time.  Lacy feels His presence and depends on His grace.  Lacy's simple faith continues to lift me up when I despair of ever feeling anything again.  He knows that his Redeemer lives.

I may not feel His presence, but He is there as surely as I breathe in and out.  He is holding our hands with every pull and tear, with every separating of joint and muscle.  He is giving us the strength to walk alongside our son and not lose heart.  He whispers the secret truth that our hearts may not feel, but truly know.  "The best remains.  The very best is yet to be."