[just an attempt to process]
This week I lost a whole family. Not of any blood relation, but so very dear to me they might as well have been. If you asked me to count the number of tears I have cried, the times they’ve crossed my mind, or the prayers I’ve prayed over these children over the past two years, I wouldn’t be able to. The whole thing was a privilege and an honor. It was an honor to become a part of something not my own – seeing myself drawn into the crayon representations of this family that the kids were so proud of. It was an even higher honor to be entrusted with the most precious of all cargo. And higher still, being able to shine the light of Jesus and sow the baby seeds.
This time of year has been hard for me in recent years, but this time the loss is deeper. I’m grieving the loss of my little kids, because if I’m being honest, I don’t know if there will be a next time or another part to this story. Those four sweet Mexibabies meant the world to me. I’ll miss the continuous stream of thoughts that went something like: “This is so hard,” followed by, “This is so perfect.” The two always seemed to go together, never one without the other.
1 Timothy 6:20 orders us to “guard what God has entrusted to you.” I loved every minute of that, but the hard part is figuring out what to do now it is no longer physically entrusted to me. It’s how I love and how I serve, and it’s all I’ve known for the past three months. Now that I have four days of summer to myself, I’m not sure I really know how to be a normal person.
I miss them all so much. I’ll miss arriving to a friendly stampede and a chorus of “Caitlin’s” and leaving to, “I wish you could stay here for 100 days.” I miss spending the forty hours, and sometimes more, each week with them. I had a key to their house (as if I didn’t know the secret way to get in if I ever happened to be locked out). I’ll miss constantly exchanging vehicles, children, and car seats. I’ll miss taking the older two to baseball practice and cheering with the babies on the bleachers. I’ll miss pouring into the fifteen-year old stepsister and driving her all over Denver in that boat of an SUV. I’ll miss being someone the mother could relate to. I’ll miss cleaning their house and getting them ready for their birthday parties and buying them treats whenever we’d go out. I’ll miss the day trips and small adventures that we shared. The nanny zoo pass is still tucked inside my wallet. I even miss the hard parts: the discipline and the diapers and accidents and potty training. Those cute toddlers! I learned how to carry two of them at once, one on each hip. That was a little psycho. I’ll miss coming back from a weekend, when they would say, “Why weren’t you here? We missed you!” I’ll miss the crazy nights when I did stay, and being woken up at 4 in the morning by a dog and a baby crawling into bed with me.
Inside all of this we’d work through life lessons together about struggles that they shouldn’t have ever had, which would always lead to answering about Jesus. Curious Carlos would always challenge with,
“How do you know that?”
“Because it says it in the Bible and the Bible is always true.”
“You know a lot of things about the Bible. How many things do you know? 1,068?”
Mostly I just loved them. That’s all. Only now I don’t know if I’ll ever be back with them. So that’s the hard part. Going back to my happy town without being a little sad, knowing this.
Here I was, each day thinking that the sacrifice was the hard part, when really, the ending, the goodbye, was a million times more trying. The grief left me with a mix of emotions that were so many and so changing that most of the time I just ended up feeling confused and trying to distracted myself in some way.
To say I dealt with it well would be a lie. I was both a wreck and a minefield. One day I’d borrow my brother’s iPod and go on runs to some weird screamo music (why?). The next, I’d burst into tears of sadness without warning during the announcements at church, while receiving concerned looks from strangers. Those days were exhausting. It took me six days before I even had the smallest desire to bring it before the Lord (dumb). But here’s what He said:
He told me to think of these past three months as a mission. One in which His strength was proven through me. Then He said that He was pleased because I had seen it through to completion, just like He knew I could. He said He “considered me trustworthy and appointed me to serve him.” Somehow those words made it all better. The pain didn’t disappear entirely, but the burden of it was lifted as the mindset shifted from temporal to eternal. And all of a sudden I’m okay. I still treasure my time spent with those kids, but there are more missions ahead and I can’t lose ground because I got stuck along the way. As this one wraps up, I need the mindset that it is time to keep pressing on.
It came down to realizing that even being away, I can still guard what God has entrusted; they’ll always be just as much mine to guard spiritually. So I pray for the next person of spiritual influence. That there will always be a continual stream of these kinds of people. The ones who will really live it out as a model for them in the next season.
He also left me with the promise that there will be more sweet, beautiful children in the future.
Even though I’m a tiny bit broken on this side of it, I’d do it all over again in a heartbeat. I don’t think I poured too much of my heart into them. I love them so.
