For Such A Time As This

How could I have known that He was preparing me; my whole life was leading up to this one moment, the greatest sorrow. He does that, God, He readies us in the most unsuspecting ways for both grand and grievous times. Every day, every season, He is molding us to hold fast to the faith He has gifted us. I can attest to this personal preparation; I know it to be true, but when it was happening, well, it is only in hindsight that I see how the Father's love shaped me to live with the piercing of a sword in the abysmal depths of my heart. Twenty-seven different schools. I attended as many during my education years. Daddy is a minister; some would call his early years of clergy a homeland mission. It is my story, within his that the Lord readied me. I was ever the new girl in school, and seldom did I adjust to the habits of one establishment before I was again, the new girl. I learned early on how to make friends and how to say goodbye. It became somewhat of an art skill. I discovered how to hear people; not their words, but their actions, their expressions, even their silence. It was in these unarticulated places that I would determine if lasting friendships could be made; ones that could survive my inevitable departure. My life, although unsettling to some, was all I knew. I learned to adapt and promptly find a new normal. This life skill would prove to be the foundation God would use when He would ask me to live with something so grievous that without this understanding, I would lose faith and all desire to keep pressing forward. Because of this constant relocation, and being the middle child, I never felt like anything was ever mine. I shared my space, my friends, my place in the family even. So, when on January 4, 1991, I gave birth to Taylor Renee', I experienced for the first time in my young life something that I could call my own. Not another living soul in all of the world, in all of time, could ever lay claim to being her mother. As she grew, it was in her that I could see how my gift of understanding others must have appeared. Taylor could "SEE" me; warts and all, yet she still adored me as I did her. Our bond was different than anything I had ever known, even with my own mother, I had never understood the healing depths of what loving and being loved could do for the soul. She was God's love in the flesh. She was my first true love. She was everything I wanted to be. Oh, her personality was nothing like I had ever encountered. A friend once described her as a supernova. Although physically beautiful, it was Taylor's character that defined who she was. A guardian of the weak, a lover of all things random, one willing to see beyond the tangible and search beneath exteriors for who people truly were. Her smile lit the room, and her fury quaked the earth. Taylor understood more about life and what mattered in her short 17 years than most of us do in our lifetimes. That changed on the eve of December 15, 2008. On that ebony, rainy night, I was called to find once again a new normal. You see it was then, just three weeks from her 18th year, God called my baby Home. With the anxiousness of a Father awaiting a child's return home, He watched and waited for a motorist to pass by too closely as she paused to cross the street. Oh, how joyful the Father must have been to welcome my baby, His child home. However, in all the festive, humanly unfathomable celebration, He, God, also waited with a broken heart to ready me for the greatest pain. He wept as He witnessed me hear the words from my brother's lips, "She didn't make it." Unable to understand at the time, but it was in His embrace that I attempted to comprehend the meaning of such a horrific thought. As I wailed, as I fell to the ground, as I physically experienced the ripping in two of my heart, it was God who carried me through the depths of despair. I was in the valley of death, but I was not alone. On December 19, 2008, I, by the strength of the Father, laid Taylor to rest. Four feet of earth separated me from the body that housed my beautiful child. Then and now I long to embrace her. My heart still cries, a wound never healed, but God, in all His glorious wonder, in ways that I cannot articulate, has given me the strength to walk through this life feeling incomprehensible pain and joy simultaneously. How could I have known my lives preparation was enabling to understand goodbyes aren't forever