Without a Word_ How a Boy's Unspoken Love Changed Everything - Jill Kelly [79]
Our renewal was about more than just our vows. It was the coming together of our hearts. What was broken in the past had been mended, and we wanted to express to everyone and to each other how much that meant and the seriousness of it.
Marriage is hard. It is. Jill and I still need help, but now we have Christ. I may not be as outwardly expressive about my faith as Jill is, but I know who saved our marriage, our family, and our future.
To think that in eight and a half years, God had been working His plan through the life of a helpless little boy who never spoke a single word, but nonetheless completely altered a family’s life for eternity is, well… indescribable.
Chapter 20
The Time in Between
One of my favorite Bible passages is Ecclesiastes 3:1–8. It begins, “There is a time for everything, and a season for every activity under heaven: a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot”… and so on. You may have read or heard these verses before and noticed that the author of Ecclesiastes compared contrasting experiences—experiences that have a period of time in between them. The time between birth and death. The time between our weeping and our laughter. The time between searching and giving up, keeping and throwing away, war and peace… and between mourning and dancing.
After more than four years of living without Hunter, it hasn’t gotten any easier. So far, my time in between—my time between mourning and dancing—has been characterized by an agonizingly slow process of grieving. After Hunter’s death I heard people say, “The first year is the hardest.” I disagree. Every day without Hunter has been hard—every day. I wish I could run away from the expectations of grief and sorrow. I’ve been told, “It will get better.” Maybe it will, but I can’t say that because I haven’t experienced the “better” yet. My arms still ache to hold my boy.
Everything has changed.
Everything is different.
And yet Christ’s sustaining love remains the same.
People say, “As time goes by, you will heal.” Why do people set a timetable for grief? If time heals, that would mean that as time goes by, the pain eventually goes away.
The pain doesn’t go away.
It doesn’t.
I live with it every day.
But I still live. I still have joy. I still find pleasure in a cup of coffee in the morning and a night out at the movies. I smile and laugh with my daughters and snuggle with my husband. But the pain is still there.
And it always will be.
Should I expect it to go away? Pain is an unlikely companion. It continues to remind me that I’m still alive. I’m still a wife and mother of three precious children. Oddly, my sorrow helps keep me focused on what really matters. It keeps me humble and grounded. It continues to remind me that I’m a stranger in a strange land—I’m not home yet!
I’ve often wondered what life would be like without heartbreak. What if I woke up tomorrow morning and everything was better? What would it be like? It’s almost impossible to comprehend, but I think life void of heartbreak is self-centered and loveless. Love is what drives my sorrow. If I hadn’t loved Hunter so much, I wouldn’t ache with longing right now. If I didn’t love him so much, the anguish of his absence would’ve dissipated by now. If God didn’t love me so much, maybe He would’ve never blessed me with a sick son.
Time doesn’t heal; it just goes by. God heals. And He chose not to heal Hunter this side of eternity. I don’t understand why. But I am convinced that He knew what was and still is best for Hunter, Jim, the girls, and me.
Maybe we needed to be healed more than Hunter did. What if Hunter’s disease wasn’t a tragedy but a triumph somehow? What we perceived as evil (surely, disease is evil), God used for good.
Could it be that in my brokenness I was healed? What if the healing I was so desperately searching for could only be found at the end of this road of brokenness and despair—at the end of myself? I don’t know. But as I continue to live and breathe and