The Longest Night of the Year

Tonight is the longest night of the year.  As I reflect, I think about the darkness that has come into my life this year.  We have lost a lot.  There is no doubt about that.  First and foremost, we are no longer the traditional family that God intended for us to be.  My Anna will not be able to get up on Christmas morning and run into the master bedroom and wake mom and dad up so that they can open presents. They celebrated with me tonight and will celebrate with my extended family Christmas night.  They will celebrate on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning with their dad.  That is a great loss for all of us.  I have had and continue to have major financial setbacks.  According to a Harvard University study, divorce is the fourth leading cause of bankruptcies.  When you divorce, you spend thousands of dollars just on lawyer fees.  Then you have the same pool of money that is now supporting two households.  I have been very blessed.  God has provided, and I have used good money management skills.  However, it has not been easy and will get more difficult as I am about to send one away to college.

But I look at it like this.  The bad news is that tonight is the longest night of the year.  We will experience more darkness than any other day in the year.  The good news is that tonight is the longest night of the year.  Starting tomorrow, we will experience more daylight than darkness.

In the same way, I have gone through my longest night.  Yes, I have experienced great loss.  But the longest night has passed, and now there is more daylight than dark.  I have gained so much through enduring the darkness. Like every parent, I knew my girls were wonderful and amazing.  However, I now have newfound respect and admiration for these two precious daughters.  This divorce has woven a unique bond among the three of us that nothing will ever break.  Tonight, they gave me a stocking that they had carefully put together.  They surprised me with a gift card to one of my favorite stores.  Also stuffed in the stocking were four of my very favorite kinds of candy.  It was not an expensive gift, but it was a great treasure to me.  They found just exactly what they knew I would love.  You cannot put a price tag on that.

I have also been given the gift of friendship through the dark times.  I have always known that I had friends, but I now know the depth of their love for me.  I would not fully understand and comprehend that great love and dedication of others had I not gone through this past year.

I have received the gift of laughter and happiness.  Someone once said you don't appreciate your health until you don't have it.  In the same way, you cannot truly appreciate being able to laugh until you have walked through the valley and not been able to muster up even a chuckle at the most hilarious moments.  But when the day came that I could laugh again, it was a wonderful day.  Over Thanksgiving, my dad told us a story.  He said that he missed my mom.  She went to the back of the house and never came back.  He finally went back to look for her and found her asleep on the toilet. My daddy, in his very country accent, said, "I had to wake ya mama up while she was sittin' on the toilet sound asleep." I laughed until there were tears running down my cheeks.  Oh, I do hope my mother is not going to be angry with me for telling this.  If she is, maybe she will forgive me because it was a defining moment for me when I knew that I could experience the wonderful joy of a delicious laugh.

Finally, I have discovered an inner strength that I never knew existed.  I found something within myself that helped me drag myself out of the bed, go to work, and face another day.  Every day that I did that, that inner strength grew stronger.  I know without a doubt that it came from God at work inside me. There were times when I could not even pray, but I knew in my heart that He was with me, and He was giving me what I needed to get through the next day, or sometimes just the next hour.

Last January, I experienced a very long night.  That night continued to grow longer and longer. Eventually, there was little or no daylight left in my life.  Yet by persevering through the night, I gained much.  Now the longest night has passed.  Thanks be to God, my family, and my friends, daylight has come, and with it arrives a new day.

Psalm 30:5b (King James Version)
Weeping may endure for a night, but joy cometh in the morning.

I also love the Message paraphrase:
The nights of crying your eyes out give way to days of laughter.

Amen!