sadness

Loss of an Icon

While the world is busy reeling over the deaths of Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett, my family mourns the loss of our own icon–my Auntie Carol.

She has been the matriarch of our family for pretty much as long as I can remember. If you needed an answer to just about anything, she was the one who could come up with an answer, whether for her own daughters, for my mother (her sister), or for me.

Almost 20 years ago she had a liver transplant, which saved and (obviously) extended her life. Ironically, it was, in the end, the transplant that took her–yesterday, while she was undergoing surgery to repair an unrelated aortic aneurysm, the blood vessels surrounding the liver, which were weak (I guess from the long-ago transplant), began to tear. The doctors, including the hospital’s transplant team, tried to repair the damaged vessels, but I guess there’s only so many times those can be stitched together.

The world feels smaller to me today, somehow.  While I rejoice with her that she is with our Lord, our family will always feel her loss.

Nothing’s the Same Anymore

I’m finding myself at a place in life that is not very comfortable to me. Everything around me seems to be changing, and from my perspective, very little of it for the better. I don’t know, maybe this is just what happens when you get older. I am losing faith in my church body as a whole, am beginning to feel like maybe they have lost sight of what’s really important. I know there are still faithful congregations out there, and thank God I belong to one, but overall, I am starting to doubt whether the higher-ups have anyone’s best interest at heart but their own.

I have come to expect feeling this way in the world–as though I don’t really matter, like I don’t have anything valuable to add, and that most people are concerned with looking out for number one, but I didn’t expect that I’d begin to feel that way about the denomination I’ve belonged to since I was baptized close to 30 years ago. But now that my voice has been marginalized as only 1/3 of 1%, I come to realize how little I mean here, even though I spent 14 years of my life in denominational education, supported my husband through Seminary, worked at the headquarters of the church, and at a congregation–still, my voice doesn’t count. And when I think of the decades long members and workers who have been told their voices don’t count either, my heart hurts. We have been trivialized and swept under the rug, just so that the boys in charge can save face publicly, not caring what damage they’re doing to the people who put them and keep them in office.

I also look at old friends, friends I thought we’d have for life, and realize I don’t even recognize them anymore. I don’t understand how people can change so much in such a short amount of time, or how they can end up opposite us on almost everything we believe, but there it is. The things and people I had come to depend on in life have become foreign to me, and if not for my family, and a few very select friends, I don’t know who I’d turn to.

My heart is heavy these days, as I come to better understand what Christ meant when He said He came not to bring peace but a sword. I guess I never figured the sword would hit so close to home.