01/09/2025
Memorial for Hazel May Lapp:
Saturday, January 18th 2024
Weaverland Anabaptist Faith Community
1-3pm
Light finger foods and dessert will be served
Guests may visit her grave site afterwards
210 Weaverland Valley Rd, East Earl, PA 17519
“I know I cannot see all things as you do,
O Lord, from the vantage of eternity.
I can only see and feel right here, right now,
This pain, this grief, this unrelenting anguish.
A part of me yet recalls- like the memory
of a birdsong, wild and sweet- that distant
promise that in the end all things will be made
right, will make sense, will somehow be redeemed.
I try to cling to that.
But such a dry exercise of faith feels
far removed from these rubbled
ruins where my heart now dwells.
My thoughts are circles, leading nowhere.
I live more often where I feel.
And I feel the shattered and
crushed pieces of my former self
pressed between these granite blocks
of grief, my soul ground down to a few,
meagre fistfuls of its irreducible fragments.
There are hours in which I cling
to your promises, as one swept to the lip
of a dizzying waterfall might clutch
an overhanging branch- and those
holy promises have never given way.
But when my grip grows weak,
I need to know, not only what I hold,
but what holds me. I need to feel
how I am held by you, O Christ.
I need you with me now, O Lord,
My Rock and my Salvation!
For I must live through this- this moment
of emptiness, and ache, and loss.
And then I must live through the next.
And the next.
For now, this moment
Is the only place
That I exist.
This moment, from which
my child is absent.
And nothing in this moment-
nothing save you, my God-
can sustain me
through the surges of
shocked bewilderment,
and utter,
utter,
exhaustion.
Silence is kept.”
