I recently went to Colorado with my mom. It was kind of a let's run away from all the sorrow together for a little while trip, but the thing with sorrow is that you can't outrun it.
On Sunday my mom suggested that we go to mountain church. So we climbed up to the middle of nowhere and sat on a rock and took off our boots and ate sticky peanut butter sandwiches and listened to a recording of my daddy preaching loud and clear in the thin mountain air. And I washed down the lumps of bread stuck in my throat with a bottle of tears.
At my dad's funeral we did one of those picture slideshows, you know the ones that remind you of how many memories there are and how much life has been lived together and how deeply you want to walk right into the frozen frame and relive it all. If only we could turn back time. If only.
Anyway, in this picture slideshow at the funeral we picked an 80's song to play in the background that my dad loved called "Mountain Cathedrals" by Bob Bennett. The beginning of the song goes:
“I’ve sung in mountain cathedrals
with steeples rising high
and alters made of evergreen
and windows made of sky”
That was so dad. Even though his full-time occupation was ministry, he worshiped best and most frequently in nature. He saw God's fingerprints in the pine needles and mountains and sky. He and mom started taking my brothers and I camping before we could walk and taught us to love the solitude and peace we found there. And thanks to him, I still feel the most at home in a bunch of trees and dirt.
I find that in fresh air my roots can grow deeper and the muck obscuring my vision is blown away. In the silence I can hear the whisper of God. In the breeze I feel His spirit moving me forward. Also, the birds and squirrels don't judge you for ugly crying - so there's that.
But the thing of it is, this time the change in scenery just made me miss my dad more because he loved the mountains. I miss him so badly I feel like my insides have turned themselves the wrong way around. The absence of him is so terrible that sometimes I wonder if there is anything still good and beautiful left in this world without him in it.
These emotions scare me. They are so intense and unrelenting and surprising that I often try, but usually fail, to stuff them away in a metal, padlocked box inside my heart. I try to forget the pain and yet I fear forgetting my dad. Because you can't extract emotion without maiming memory.
Grief, sorrow, joy, pain, peace, love, loss, anger... these are inseparable. We don't get to pick which we feel and which we stuff; if you start to compress one the others will get caught in the motion. Sometimes healing means going through the thick of your emotions instead of trying to escape them.
On the mountain side where I had attempted to run away from my grief, I found instead peace in the grieving. In listening to my dad's voice surrounded by the wonder of nature, the might of mountains, the steadfastness of trees, I was reminded that there is yet beauty in this world. That God is still gracious and unmoved. That my dad is so very near to me when I worship along with him in these mountain cathedrals.
Dad loved nature, he worshiped best in the midst of God's majesty. And somehow the Rockies made it feel like I was closer to heaven, closer to where dad is still preaching - this time eternally; like I could hike a little higher and reach out my hand and somehow touch the same air as him, somehow catch a note of the heavenly chorus. I found that by running into the throne room of God instead of running away from sorrow, I found true respite from the crushing burden of loss.