We booked a trip on Etihad Airways months ago during their sale with plans to travel on to Vietnam and Cambodia with our three kids. This past month since Henry’s death, we didn’t know whether to go ahead or stay home. We finally decided to go on a different version.

Yesterday was a good day. We went to an elephant camp with our two living children and learned how to care for and verbally command the elephants. As we were leaving, we looked down and saw this carved elephant in a pile of leaves on the ground. I picked it up because Henry’s nursery has lots of elephants and they always remind me of him, and then I noticed how broken and incomplete the carving is.

This carving looks like how I feel, like how our family feels and how my future seems. I’m not sure what the exact message is from this little wooden guy, but I felt I needed to keep him. Maybe to help me remember that God has redeemed us and loves us in our brokenness and incompleteness? Maybe because a part of me feels like everything is ruined now that we must go on without such a significant part of our family, but despite this I don’t want us to end up in the trash heap?

Right now I will keep him to remind me that God’s strength is made perfect in our weakness. We have seen it in Biblical and more recent history as well as in our own lives. Please pray that this pain and realization of our brokenness and incompleteness will not pass, but that we will learn what God has for us to learn, and it will be used for His good and the good of others. I came across this in C.S.Lewis’s “A Grief Observed” last night. “Heaven will solve our problems, but not, I think, by showing us subtle reconciliations between all of our apparently contradictory notions. The notions will all be knocked out from under our feet. We shall see that there never was any problem.” “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. Isaiah 55:8