One feels like she is running a marathon in knee-deep mud while someone keeps moving the finish line farther out. She is waiting to bring two daughters home from Haiti, and the loooooong process of adoption is laying her out flat.
The other found out yesterday that her cancer has metastasized to several bones. Her finish line seems too close. She is trying to figure out how to make each day mean something.
I don't know what to do, what to say, how to pray, so I pray selfishly that God would move the finish lines closer, further. That when my beautiful friends cross them, they would both receive a prize so glorious that the past suffering would melt away in four little black arms...in two loving, eternal, unfathomable arms.
While my friends are in these epic races, I am plodding on in the "long obedience," trying to learn from their stories, trying to serve and love and fully live out my little days. The next few will be spent laughing and breaking bread with 3 women who have left their indelible marks on me as we lived life together in my high school and college years. I will visit Tracy, my high school friend who laid on the floor beside me at sleepovers and talked about the God who would eventually come into my life and turn it upside down, and Mara, who pulled me out of my small, self-centered thinking in college, and challenged me to think and love and live more deeply, and with Becky, who befriended me in college and has never stopped being the cheerleader of my faith and endeavors.
My finish lines this week will lead to their doorsteps and into their arms, and I suppose that is how we are to live, with daily finish lines, small, meaningful milestones, and much gratitude.
Beautiful, Jill. Such a bittersweet reflection on observing their experiences as a close friend.
ReplyDeleteI do think it is a series of finish lines, small and large, near and far, keeping us moving forward. We just watched part of the movie "Meet the Robinsons" on Saturday, and the way it encourages the continual trial of new things in life, without dwelling on the failures, makes it one of my favorite movies. Some lines do mark the end with sadness, and some with triumph and joy, but they all mark an ending. I'm so thankful that the ending that seems the most final really isn't, and that one day we will all be reunited with the others who made it there first. In the meantime, I'm thankful for friends like you who are stepping into these finish lines with grace and determination, showing us just how it's done.
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