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I’m going home tomorrow.

967 days have passed since I walked out that garage door-utterly shell-shocked and devastated by Sam’s senseless and heinous death and praying with every ounce of faith I had for Mercy’s precious life to be spared.

And yet it wasn’t.  

Tomorrow, my husband and I will step through the door of our family home together, for the first time since we left to start picking up the pieces of the mess we were handed.

Such. A. Mess. 

To that end-I don’t write much anymore, because most of what I want to say right now wouldn’t inspire a single ounce of faith in even the most Jesus infused soul.  967 days out and I’m wrestling even more heavily now with questions I’ll never know the answer to this side of Heaven.  Questions that I know I won't get an answer to, yet I simply have to let them run through my soul and out into that black pit of doubt.  Because that's what grief looks like.  

And I’m just so very tired.  To the very core of my heart, my soul, and my inmost being.
It’s a mind-numbing mental exhaustion that I simply can’t seem to shake. My words don’t come easily, just living everyday life often feels so painful and awkward.   Relationships are strained and my faith feels distended and splintered.

Life hasn’t stopped for us.  We don’t “get a break” because our lives imploded when our kids died.  We’ve had to figure out how to keep putting one foot in front of the other in a world that often has little patience for extended grief or stories that don’t end with a quick redemption.
And ours doesn't feel like a redemption story.  I can’t and I WON’T try to find a silver lining buried in the tragic deaths of my children. In my heart, I believe that someday I can find purpose and a measure of joy, but for now we’re surviving.  

And taking the next step.

Tomorrow that next step is figuring out if we can live, every day, in the home we built for all of us with just some of us.
And after that, it’s finding out what life without the Marine Corps means for a family that started there, grew there and for some-
ended there.

So tonight I beg for your prayers, my friends.  We need some vigorous ones in the days to come.  We are in desperate need of an undergirding of the Holy Spirit, an infusion of divine strength into our souls and a potent dose of the fire of faith to carry us into an uncertain future.

Tonight my heart is anxious, but it's also certain of something that Cassie reminded me of today.

Walking in that house can’t ever be worse than surviving the last 967 days without Sam and Mercy.  So we’ll make it.  It’ll probably completely suck, but we’ll survive.  

And take the next step.

“Enlarge the place of your tent,

    stretch your tent curtains wide,

    do not hold back;

lengthen your cords,

    strengthen your stakes."

                                                  Isaiah 54:2   

Perhaps the widening of my tent is willfully choosing to pull back the curtains of doubt, fear and isolation.  It's facing the malevolent whispers of the enemy and declaring them powerless to rob my house of the strength we can only EVER find in The Lord.  

Will you pray that for us tonight? 

And for every family facing an uncertain future?

Those facing a future without all of the ones that make them whole? 

Thank you from the depths of our souls-

Prayers are our balm of Gilead and we are ever so grateful for each one offered to the Father on our behalf.  

with love always, 

clan mac mama

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