20 years today, brokenness and redemption overlap

20 years ago, today, September 21, 2003, was a resurrection day, not that I knew it at the time. I literally had no idea. It would take me months to even see it. It would take me years to believe it. 20 years later I am living the life I didn’t dare dream (but always hoped) was possible.

The paradox of the beginning of a fresh new life 
at the dawn of loss that cataclysmically broke me.

17 years ago, today, September 21, 2006, was also a resurrection day; a day I had long hoped for. It had finally arrived. Three years of hoping, and a miracle of new life hoped for. Three years of long days and many agonising hours, three years exactly, two entirely different days and seasons, yet a consistent hope joining them both.

Both resurrection days were entirely different.

Precisely 3 years apart, I think, is no coincidence.

Let me explain more about the details:

The first one was the day before my first marriage ended, which happened to be the very first day of 20 years of sobriety thus far. If you had have asked me on that day if I knew what the next 20 years would entail, you would have discovered that I simply had no idea. If I went back to that day, and only knew what was about to occur, there is no way I could ever see it as a resurrection day. 

Within 24 hours my life would unravel; I would lose my wife, free access to my children, and my home that I had invested so much of myself in. Everything of that life disappeared in a matter of seconds at 8pm the following day, 22 September 2003. It all changed in the blink of an eye. And yet, as I look back to this date 20 years ago, the very essence of the new life was germinating. And yet, so much loss...

Not that I knew it,
but I was about to be reformed.

Even as I endured a kind of revenant experience,
(a death-of-self experience)
a door was being prepared for me
to be opened as an eventual resurrection experience.

Even as I watched my eldest daughter 
commence the bravest of journeys.

Even as my relationship with my three daughters 
was being re-engineered through loss.

Read in my mother’s Facebook comment five years ago how mortally afraid my parents were for my life.  Oh how faithful my mother and father have been in my life, and in the lives of my family!

Wind the clock forward three years to the second resurrection day, Sarah and I held each other for the very first time. We count September 22, the day I asked Sarah’s father permission, as the commencement of our courtship. Three years I had spent as a single father, having grieved nearly half that time. I had ventured into the loneliness of a life that couldn’t pick and choose when I could see my children. And yet I was embraced by a community called the local church, and they showed me that God had a bigger vision for my life.

The first resurrection day was coincidently the day before a death, where one life died, where the door to that life slammed shut, and threatened my very existence. The second resurrection day was the completion of a barebones construction work; a man rebuilt for marriage, even if I still had so much to learn.

Doors slam shut in life, and it
always happens without warning.

50 years ago TODAY my parents 
suffered the loss of my sister to stillbirth.

TODAY I spend with my Dad and 
we remember not only Debbie but Mum, too.

We never see doors slamming shut as a favour done for us. We always resent the fact that we have lost control. But a door slammed shut isn’t the end of the story. And this is something we must hold onto amid the resonance of an impending and enduring hell.

There is no better example of a living hell than loss, but just picture Jesus descending to hell before He was resurrected. God becomes real in our lived experience when we continue to hope beyond the experience of a form of death.

A form of death, a door slammed shut, isn’t the end of the story... the story continues to unfold.

Even as a door slams shut in our face,
with the hope of resurrection, we ultimately rise.

As much as we can, we must diligently trust for a better day to eventually arrive. If we can do that, and trust in the eventual resurrection day arriving, it will eventually arrive. Hope is pivotal. And such hope is a mirage without faith.

See how faith in God, faith in redemption, is important 
when you find your life smashed against the rocks?

You may choose to trust in something other than God, and I would say good luck with that, because it is only in diligently following God that we are able to trust in a force that is entirely good and trustworthy; it may take years, but redemption is the destiny of those who have faith enough to step out each step of life’s journey the best they can.

I could not have planned the coherence of these two resurrection dates. Only as I looked back could I see that God was communicating His faithfulness through such a ‘coincidence’.

20 years ago today, brokenness was mine for an extended time.  But brokenness was the catalyst for the redemption that was coming.  “If you’re going through hell,” as Sir Winston Churchill said, “keep going!”

“Do not grow weary in doing good, 
for at the proper time you will reap a harvest 
of goodness if you don’t give up.”
—Galatians 6:9

Image: my daughters and I in December 2004.