First Christmas

Christmas 2015

Christmas 2005

First Christmas

   Well the first Christmas since Roderick left us has come and gone.  What do I write now; I’m still sitting here with tears streaming down my face.  I had not expected Christmas to be so difficult.  I pray that we will be able to use this valley as another step toward complete healing.  One of the things I have started to pray for is that we as a family, all four of us, will experience complete healing.  I hear so many mothers saying that the pain never stops you just get used to it, or something similar.  My sister talked to one mother who lost her son five years ago and she said the Lord had been so gracious to them, their son was always with them but they were no longer grieving, that encourages me.  Healing is possible.  I know it will take time but I believe there is healing with the Lord, I believe He can and will heal us.  I don’t believe it is His will for us to endure pain for the rest of our lives.  We will always have the scar and we will always have a part of our family not physically with us but we can heal and we can have a happy life and experience a happy Christmas again.  My prayer is also that we will use this experience to build stronger relationships and tighter bonds between the four of us and also with friends surrounding us.  That is part of the beauty that God can make out of tragedy, the trash that can turn into gold.  The devil, who’s to blame for all the tragedy in this world by bringing sin into it, will also do his utmost to use this for his benefit and turn us against each other and against God in any way he can by filling our minds with lies.

   I want to thank all the many friends and family who have taken the time to remember us in your celebrations and sent us messages of encouragement.  Every one of them has meant a lot.  Two of Roderick’s friends stopped by with a gift, two more have promised to stop by and one of them sent an email.  I feel so special when Roderick’s friends miss him and will go the extra step of letting us know.  Thank-you for allowing God to use you to send us comfort and strength to keep going.  Never think those actions are in vain.  God bless You all and Happy New Year to All.

Last Christmas

Roderick admiring the fish tank he got for Christmas last year

The steak knives I received
from Roderick last year

   Last Christmas

Last Christmas Roderick spent all his money on Christmas gifts even his savings account which was suppose to stay there for a car, not that it was a whole lot.  Jake and I were a little concerned and we questioned him a couple times on whether he was sure he wanted to spend so much, he was having so much fun buying gifts for his friends and family though that we could hardly say much but one time I got an email with an order he had made that was over a hundred dollars.  I knew he had already bought a gift for his girlfriend and presumed it was a gift for Stanton.  I thought he only had a hundred dollars left and knew he had a few more people on his list so this time I questioned him.  “Roderick” I said, “are you sure you want to buy such an expensive gift for one person?  You still have more people left on you list”.

   “I still have more money, mom.  I can buy them gifts yet,” he said.  That was it, he said nothing else, when he got up to go downstairs I repeated one more time, “Roderick, you could still cancel the order and buy a cheaper gift”.   He turns to me and says, “you just don’t want me to spend money on you because you saw those were kitchen knives for you”.  I felt so bad for having checked up on him when he had wanted to surprise me with a gift.  He did not cancel that order and last Christmas I got a set of steak knives with wooden handles and every one of the six knives was made out of a different kind of wood.  Jake received an ornamental golf bag with clubs that Roderick got his own message engraved on.  None of our kids had ever got us Christmas gifts before. 

   The other day I was thinking back to last Christmas, how Roderick spent all his money and how after Christmas he would often mention how he needed to get a job and that he had literally no money.  On his birthday his cousin Stanton gave him this funny card that said, “to the guy that has everything” on the front and Roderick joked yea I have everything except no money.  I never felt that Roderick regretted giving gifts that Christmas but I know that he realized keeping money in the bank would take effort on his part.  Just two weeks before the accident I sold his dogs for him and he finally had some money in the bank. 

   Now looking back, those gifts he bought for his loved ones are a much bigger treasure then that money in the bank would have been after he left.

   As I’m reflecting on last Christmas my thoughts go to heaven.  What is Roderick doing this Christmas?  Is he not just enjoying his favourite music but also a part of it playing percussion which was always his dream but the amount of practice it would require kept him from it, now he can play without learning.  Is he playing hockey on some beautiful Chrystal clear frozen lake that is frozen without cold temperatures and there is beautiful green grass surrounding it or is he surrounded by dancing children all wanting to sit on his lap teaching them to make funny faces?  Does he ever have time to look down on his family and friends here on earth?  One day we will join him, one day we will know until that day we will continue on in faith.

   I wanted to share another Christmas memory from last year.  My youngest brother had the Christmas gathering at his house on the farm in Riverton last year.  His boys had made a back yard skating rink.  The cousins were kind of divided into two groups.  There were seven older cousins who spent their time chatting and playing table games and then there were eight younger cousins who kept the house feeling like a zoo, with two cousins kind of in between, one of whom would romp around with the younger ones and the other one wherever he so desired, at times with the older ones and at times with the younger ones.  Most of the younger ones put on their skates and went outside to skate, some with hockey sticks and a puck some just skating around.  Us parents would enjoy watching them through the window enjoying a little less noise in the house.  It didn’t take long until we saw Roderick out their with the little ones making a fool of himself, trying to play hockey with the little guys, slipping and sliding and falling in his shoes. 

   The door opened and I heard “Mom?” 

   I recognized the voice of my oldest son, so among all the moms I was the one that was meant.  “Yes?” I called back.

   “Did you bring my skates?”

   “Yes I did.  They’re in the back on the Acadia.” I answered

   “Oh good, I didn’t think I had skates.”  He replied.  (How I wish I could hear that voice-calling mom again.)

   Soon he was out there on his skates, being the only older cousin playing hockey with his younger cousins.  That is a memory his younger cousins and this proud mother will not soon forget.

Christmas without Roderick, or Not?

  “Are you doing anything special for Roderick this Christmas?”  The Hairdresser asked me today.

   “I don’t know,” I answered “I’ve been thinking about it but would there be anything wrong with just not doing anything?  Doing something just brings to much pain”.

   “There’s no right or wrong,” she said “but you could do something as simple as giving a donation in Roderick’s honour”.

   Then she proceeded to tell me how they had gone to scatter her brother-in-law’s ashes and her brother had asked her sister and nephew if they wanted to go shoot some golf balls.  Her sister and nephew had said they didn’t feel like it but it had been a beautiful day so my hair dresser had said, she would like to shoot some golf balls and for an hour they had spent time just leisurely shooting golf balls.  Later her sister and nephew had thanked her for making them shoot golf balls and it hit me, ‘how true”.  So often we have to force ourselves to do something and later feel so grateful that we did even when we did not feel like it.

   Even though this first Christmas season is tough without Roderick and I can’t say that it’s exciting or fun I still want it to be one to look back on and know that it’s been meaningful and we want to go through it in such a way that we can continue on in our journey gratefully.

   So I’ve got a plan on what we will do to include Roderick in our Christmas but I can’t say because after all it’s Christmas and Christmas is full of surprises.

   We have so much to be grateful for and God has given us so many wonderful promises and that is what we will focus on.  I will share a couple paragraphs from my devotions this morning.

  So…how come it doesn’t happen?  Why do we lose loved ones? Why do situations sometimes go badly even after we’ve prayed?

   I can’t tell you why in every case, but we have a choice to make.  We can't stop believing God’s Word just because our circumstances don’t always match up with what it says.  We need to choose to believe.

   This planet has its share of trouble and sometimes bad things happen but our God will never let us down.  If something doesn’t work out the way you had hoped, you may not know why…but you can be sure it isn’t because God wanted it to go badly.  God is good all the time!

  

Roderick checking out his Christmas stocking two years ago

Precious Possessions

  

   A dad just yesterday said how good it was to be able to have a good’s nights rest.  He has an almost 3 year old son and almost one year old daughter and so many nights were interrupted by them waking up, one would wake up and then the noise would wake the other up, now they were all up when they were suppose to be sleeping.  Then go to work all day after that was hard.  Now this dad said all this with love, he wasn’t complaining; you could tell he loved his kids a lot but it got me thinking.  You know, you have these stresses with your kids and then you have the occasional moment that is so precious.  Like at night when they share their heart or you see them do some heroic thing and you think, ‘this moment makes it worth it all, this is what I would miss if I didn’t have kids’. 

   The truth is when you loose a child; the hardest thing can be that you now can sleep through the night.  You wake up at night from your sleep thinking you heard the voice of your child only to realize that voice is forever quiet and you will never again get to wake up for that child.  You long to be up all night for that child.

   With Roderick there was no such thing as a day off or even a night off.  I might have been running around every night of the week to all the different doings the kids had and I’m thinking finally a night off and as I’m sitting down on the couch to relax Roderick comes up and says, “mom, I’ve been wanting you to take me to the pet store to buy a fish, your not busy now are you, can we go?” 

   All I can think is “I so long to just relax but he’s been asking for days and if I don’t do it today, when will I have the next chance’. 

   Now with the busiest part of our winter taken away, Roderick’s hockey, I have evenings that I get to relax but now I don’t want to sit down and relax, I don’t care how tired I am I’d get up in an instant to take him to the pet store or anywhere else he wanted to go. 

   My point is the thing that causes the most stress is what you miss the most, I guess it’s because even though my child has left me, my love for that child is still just as strong as it was before but the love has nowhere to go.  You can’t put action to that love and therefore the more that love is bottled up with nowhere to go the more you long to love on that child and therefore you want to love in a way that is the biggest sacrifice because that uses the strongest kind of love.  Not sure if that makes sense.

   I believe the reason raising kids is so stressful is because they are so precious.  You know every success in life adds stress to your life.  When you finally saved up enough to buy a car, now you’ve got the stress of changing the oil, getting it repaired when it breaks down, keeping it clean.  Then you buy your first house, now you’ve got to pay the bills, mow the lawn etc.  Our Pastor often reminds us of that.  But, you know, a car is easily replaceable if it causes too much stress, not so with kids, they are your most prized possessions.  They are irreplaceable and they are eternal, therefore the stress is so much greater.  Once you have those kids your life is forever changed, you want to be able to sleep through the night, you want it to go back the way it was before the kids just to be able to come into the house and relax and sleep through the night but after one stress comes the next one but no matter how much you long for the freedom you had before you had kids it’s not going to happen.  They are too precious and they have your heart; that cannot be taken away from you.  Even if you loose your kids, there is not those freedoms back only emptiness because the love in your heart for them doesn’t leave.

   Lets always remember this when we get overwhelmed with the responsibility and busyness of our kids and focus on the blessing.  They are the most prized possession we have and guess what, the only possession that we can take with us to heaven.  Not that I think of my kids as a possession.  They are not really our own to keep but that’s a different topic for a different day.