Quiet strength

It is Tuesday night. Silence. I strain to hear some sound from within or without our cabin. None. Even the glow from the wood stove is withholding its usual tick...tick. Two students in the house are studying. My wife is recovering from the flu by sleeping noiselessly.

I sat with a friend and her family today. Brave sons, daughter and husband; loving siblings and nieces and others sobbed their good-byes to her. We watched and wept as she breathed her last, ending what has been a rugged, ragged cancer-path. It is a loud agony to lose loved ones...even for those of faith. Yet a Silence prevailed in the room, hovering somewhere near the hearts of those who wept and embraced and spoke of their undying love for the departed, and for one another.

Somehow in scenes such as these--and I've witnessed many--there is a Peace that offers itself. Loved ones, between bouts of grief's wracking pain, seem to lean back into the Stillness, finding Rest even in the early moments of their grief journey.

Often when our spirits are present near the borderlands of life and death, we come-away humbled, quieted and still. Somehow midst these toughest of times, we discover that we have been renewed by the stripping-away of all. Because we have not been made bare: Love clothes us.