My finger's like a piece of pie

I put my wedding ring back on a week ago. I’m not double-minded, and I usually don’t waffle in my decisions. But grief has a way of leaving you untethered, adrift, without traction. I expect it’s all going to be sort of squishy before things settle down.

I had proper motives for putting my ring in safekeeping. Since Susan had gone to Heaven two months before, it was a tangible step for me to move on, to heal. It’s not that I want to close a door on the past, but I don’t want to be shackled by it. I gotta go forward. But its absence from my finger tripped me up. Not wearing it felt as unnatural as wearing it feels normal. I kept being startled when absent-mindedly touching my finger, as though I forgot to tell my hand that I removed my ring on purpose. 

But really, the blank space on my finger was too much of an exclamation point behind the constant, silently droning statement that Susan has died and that we’re to remain apart for the rest of this earthly life. That blank space underscored my longing for her.

Still ringless, I went to God with my desires. All of them. When you think about it, our lives in this flesh are all about desires – to have our fill of food for hunger, drink for thirst, sleep for rest, comfort for pain, money for peace of mind, applause for ego, sex for lust, domination for power, and on and on. Our flesh is a huge, gaping mouth that will never be filled or satisfied no matter how much you dump into it.

I thought about our tendency to substitute the flesh for the spirit. We’re willing to chase our desires and spend enormous amounts of time, money and energy on them and then, when finally surrounded with an abundant quantity of what we want, we find it tastes tinny. When we decide we really didn’t want that thing, we move on to capture the next one.

I thought about marriage, and how in it God gave us the greatest relationship we could ever choose. I thought about how a husband and wife are joined together in love to know and be known together more than with any other person. I thought about how God designed loving, committed marriage to show us a small but tangible example of the intimacy he created us to have with him. I thought about how easily we can substitute flesh for spirit in marriage and expect our mates to love us perfectly and completely, the way only God himself can.

Then I thought about God himself. I thought about all of our longings. I realized again how we so easily stuff everything imaginable into the mouth of desire, hoping it fits into the God-shaped space inside us, and how reluctant we are to actually put God himself in there.

So my ringless self sat there before God and admitted that wearing my ring would comfort me. I said that although wearing it would still remind me of my longing for Susan, it would also prompt a prayer that I might desire him even more. I’ve said that prayer a lot lately. I am under construction. And my finger’s like a piece of pie – it has meringue on it. 

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I expect this will be my last post on this blog since Susan's brain tumor journey is complete. I have more to write, but differently, so there's a book and some other stuff percolating. I'll share details here when I have them.