August 31st

This is one of those pictures that paints a thousand words, or suggests a thousand stories. It's blurry I know, but basically what it says is that my father died on the 31st August when I was four, my older sister was six, and my Mum was six months pregnant with my younger sister. It bothers me sometimes that I suspect I slept through it. That momentous event that charged the course of my life, and all our lives, and irrevocably altered the person I was to become.

Recently at the Faithful Writers Conference we had to do a writing task. One of the options was a reflective piece on human suffering. So I decided to write about the family visits to the cemetery that followed my father's death. What happened there and how the response of each individual has shaped how they still respond to anything that goes near there. That August 31st reverberates through all our lives.

A little while ago told the story of those graveside visits to a new but trusted friend. They found themselves 'singularly moved' and went away and wrote me a poem based on John 11:33-37, which records the weeping of Jesus over the death of Lazarus and the sorrow of his sisters. The poem ended looking up at this Saviour who shed his tears, and then his blood, for us - so we can now cast all our cares on him. And it wasn't in the poem but we can then hope for the time when "He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away" Rev 21:4.

(I'm not up to sharing the writing piece, or the poem, in entirety, with the anonymous world. The other day, however, I received a link from a friend, with bizarre timing, that gives a rather different insight into what can become of children who experience grief. So, excuse the explicit language and read this short piece instead.)