Is Enough Actually Not Enough

One of the things I like best about the church I go to is that even though I haven’t seen some of my ‘church friends’ in a long time, I can pick right up talking with them like they never left. I had cause to take advantage of that privilege recently and it made me think.

I see a woman I’ve not seen in probably almost a year. I knew she was in the beginning stages of what could be a nasty divorce and I had been wondering how she was doing for some months now. It was great to see her and be able to catch up and offer what support to her I could. But it was when the conversation turned to what she was doing to prepare for single motherhood of her three children that worried me.

Here’s what got me thinking. She has finished a medical trade school and is already working a weekday job that has become more hours, by her own admission, than she could have hoped. But then she mentioned taking a job at a hospital for the weekends. She said it was to provide for her family and be able to stand on her own two feet once the divorce was final.

The thought hit me. When is she going to see the children she is striving so hard to provide for? Where is the line where working to give her children what they need/want takes the place of being there for them, staying involved in their lives? Time after time it’s been proven that time, not things, is what kids ultimately crave from their parents.

I know I’m lucky that I can stay home with my kids and  pray I am never alone in caring for my children. I also know that mothers that work are also lucky in other ways.

But when is enough actually not enough?

(Photos Courtesy of http://www.sxc.hu/)

A quick view of grief

My first love has been gone 9 years today. The man who loved me no matter how crazy I got. The man I stood beside no matter how far down the bottle he crawled.  My dad was certainly one of a kind.

The dense fog this morning felt like it was just for me. It felt like insulation, or a dampener, for the inevitable yearly removal of the scab of his absence. It came a little later this year, gratefully. I had spent some time working for others – a sure way to relieve troubles of your own. And in the quiet of going home it hit me, “Today is the 22nd. Today is the 22nd.” So, through a mist closer than the one forming on my windshield, I make it home to spend the day.

Does time make the grief go away? Obviously not. Does time make it easier to get through? Some years.

I do have the assurance I will see him when I, too, leave this life. And while I’m here I have the assurance that God is watching out in particular for people like me:

Sing to God, sing praise to his name,
    extol him who rides on the clouds
his name is the Lord—
    and rejoice before him.
 A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows,
    is God in his holy dwelling. (Psalm 68:4-5, link from Biblegateway.com)