holy ground

The long line of days when there's been no entry here tells its own story.

Like the long flat line on the hospital screen which gently draws a final line beneath a person's life, the lack of entries here has been occasioned by the steady downward line of Mum's declining health and then, at midday yesterday, her peaceful, sacred death.

(That wasn't a miss-print, by the way! It was holy ground on which we all stood, and not a frightening experience at all).

The bulk of my life has been spent at the side of her bed these past few days. And I wouldn't have chosen to be anywhere else at all. Her dieing, and her death itself, was marked throughout by just so many tokens of the gracious hand of God upon us all.

And I mean that. Just so many, constant tokens of his hand upon our lives. It's actually that, far more than any sorrow there might be, it's that, the sheer, persistent, overwhelming goodness of the Lord I find the hardest thing to cope with in it all!

Does that sound strange? I think our hearts can cope with pain and sorrow - however hard and sore such things can be - far better than they cope with that huge, eternal, ever so extravagantly tender love of God. My heart is simply just not big enough to cope with and contain the vastness of such wild and warm and winsome love from God.

If my heart is broken at all, it's not by the shattering blows from outwith of that grief at the death of my Mum; but rather from within, through being stretched beyond its bursting point by the personal, perfect, always so particular love and care of God the great Creator for the likes of such as me.

These last few days we've simply been beside her. And with her through these days we've known, in ways that go beyond all words - we've known the Lord himself being there beside us too.

It was, in truth, a privilege.

That thin, flat line which separates eternity from time is very much the line on which we stood. And on that fragile threshold it was given us to see, to catch some small and fleeting glimpse of God in all the glory of his love and grace and power in Jesus Christ.

Awe before the bright, effulgent majesty of God is what we knew. Our feet have surely stood on holy ground.