Covered

My first grandfather passed away sometime around my eleventh birthday, leaving my grandmother a widow for the last two decades of her life.   I only really remember her as a single lady.  I imagine her alone in her apartment, devouring the daily newspaper, while sipping on tea and munching butter tarts.   She preferred her solitude, in part I think due to a life long hearing condition.  She was an introvert by nature, and though weak in constitution, lived a hearty 95 years, several past what her family had anticipated and prepared for.   She was greatly loved and inadvertently created a legacy of little women and gentle men. 

This year for the first time, I heard the expression: as you get older, life gets inevitably more complicated and painful. You experience more loss, more setback, and greater disappointment. But you learn (hopefully) through age and wisdom, to weather the storms with increased grace and understanding. With expanded patience, and a more open heart.   It is a tricky paradox, two conflicting experiences competing for our attention.

I remember her couch; her “chesterfield” on those sleepovers.  Jersey fitted sheet pressed tightly, almost sterile expanded perfectly over flowered cushion. Westminster Abbey chimed in on the hour, at great volume, which she may have heard faintly, cradling her as a comfort reminding her of home and routine. My synapses recorded the smells of her Ivory soap, and Charlie perfume.  They photographed her laundered sheets, and perfectly pressed “slims”. Together, legacy bearer and granddaughter wove memories on scrabble boards and cherry wood tables with seven-up glasses and old dutch chips. 

I knew her as grandma, not woman.  I was unfamiliar with her heartache. She sheltered her longings and unmet dreams, to put on a pedestal, her family and theirs.   Without fail, her smile, her lit up blue eyes would greet us each as we met with her.  In apartment walls, in hospital beds, and in her last home. Tucking away her dark times, her struggle, grasping for something bigger, something more lovely that stands the test of time.  Her paradox also present and fighting.  The dreary and the mundane, the injustice and the unfair, with the birth and the beauty and the loveliness all held together in one.  Ninety five years of loving on.  While living in the struggle.

I know we glorify in death. We lift up and erase brokenness.  We illuminate only beauty. But I think it's  okay for us to do this as He tells us, it is finished. It is written. We are covered. In our blank spots, and in our peanut brittle states, where he has us reflected back in His perfection.    He calls us here up from weakness to lift our heads and look to Him who is greater, who is bigger. Him who has the paradox.  Who won it over. Who loves us in it, who calls us through it. And reminds us, child, in this I am enough for you.

But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that Christ’s power may rest on me.

~2 Corinthians 12:9