night weeping and morning joy

We woke in the night to the sound of Annabelle weeping in the woods. Her mournful cries echoed in the night darkness as she sought her baby boy. Michael found Annabelle lying beside her dead baby in the high pasture yesterday morning. When the baby was born, she didn’t get the membrane covering his face removed quickly enough so he was unable to breathe. It was a sad start to the month of October. Once again my annual journey through this glorious month begins with death.
October, my death anniversary month, has taught me a great deal about prayer. This is the time I remember and grieve the deaths of my sister, my first husband and my father. With the passage of time certain rituals have developed that honor our lives together and apart. The fresh, raw, sharp, stabbing pain of new grief called out to God in anguished, abbreviated, often wordless prayers has eased now. The quickening of grief pain comes still but the edges are rounded, softened by gratitude for the presence of these beloved ones in my life then and now. After sixty years, the pattern of loss and grief has been woven into the fabric of my daily life. It enriches and gives texture to my joy. This could not have come to be without prayer.
The times that try your soul will call forth prayer in honesty and anger and grief and love and suffering and joy. Joy is the unlikely companion in this prayer journey but as necessary for me as the grief. Always we live in paradox... life and death... tears and laughter... hope and despair... love and hate... and prayer is the one way I have to pour this all out to God and ask the questions for which there are no answers. My answers have come not as one bright shining revelation on a road to Damascus but accumulated over the years through God showing up in the ones who surround me.
When Tim died, Mary Lynn, Walt and Ida held me close, being the answers to my prayers. When Gayle died, new sisters of choice wrapped their arms around me while I wept. When daddy died, neighbors and family sat and cried and laughed together as we told stories about our life with daddy. The old hymn, "How Firm a Foundation", says it well. "When through fiery trials thy pathway shall lie, My Grace, all sufficient, shall be thy supply; The flame shall not hurt thee- I only design thy dross to consume and thy gold to refine".
Annabelle was surrounded by her herd this morning as she wept at the birthplace of her baby boy. I am surrounded by my herd who are the faces of God for me, the arms of God for me, the answers to my prayers. Weeping may tarry for the night, but joy comes with the morning. Psalms 30:5b Today I give thanks for weeping and laughter, for all the answers to prayer I have been given, for prayer that gives me a connection to the One who cares for me all the days of my life. I am blessed.