On the Wings of the Wind

Excerpt from Chapter 6 of On the Wings of the Wind

Loneliness comes in many ways during a lifetime. The most common experience of loneliness comes from not feeling God’s love. The second most common form of loneliness is not having the love of a family. The third form of loneliness comes from not having a spouse to love or be loved in return. 

Only God can give us the love that we all so desperately need. And He will give it to us if we let Him, if we have faith and belief. We must put love for God first and foremost in our lives.

Love is patient, love is kind. … It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (1 Corinthians 13: 4, 7, 8)  

When I became a widow, I found myself drowning in grief and self-pity. My life seemed worthless, and I felt useless to myself and everyone else around me. My job with the family corporation combined with my life as a wife and mother had been too strenuous for John and me both. We had two children while we struggled to survive the hardships on our own. We had been so busy in our lives that there had been little time left for a relationship with God.

Though I didn’t know it, God knew all along the future he had planned for me. He was just waiting for me to turn to him for help. In my grief and self-pity, however, I didn’t want help from anyone.

My son suggested that my granddaughter come to live with me. But that wasn’t what I needed. I needed to have God in my life. I needed to learn how to talk with Him as well as pray to him about everything. I needed to learn all over again to trust and rely only on Him.

As I read the Bible, I came to understand that God’s love is a self-giving love, with no expectations of anything in return. God gives love to us because He is love itself.
Man’s love for a woman is different. It is based on human needs and has expectations of returned love. I found it difficult not to be receiving love from my spouse. We had done nearly everything together. We lived in a 24/7 relationship.

My life was empty without John. As my husband, lover, friend, and partner, he was always with me. Our partnership, which had lasted nearly four decades, had been shattered by death.  The sentence “until death do us part” in my wedding vows took on a new and terrible meaning. Death is forever.

I was still young, and now I was disenchanted with life. I was left to face every day alone, and the business world holds no compassion for widows. I was not a fighter, and that’s what I needed to be so the business John had spent his life building would survive.
Not having a husband, I thought, made all life meaningless. Children and grandchildren and all the activities of the time could not fill the void in my heart. Life became a continual struggle to find peace within myself. But in my heart, I knew I needed spiritual help. Through the presence of His Holy Spirit, I could renew my personal relationship with God.

Looking back, I realized that even though I had come from a Christian family, I was long overdue for personal spiritual guidance. The answers had to come from God. I knew instinctively that faith in the Trinity would bring peace and harmony into my life again.
As a child and teenager, I had been taught not to dwell on an event but rather to see what God was trying to teach me through the event. Now as a widow, I needed to follow that advice. I had to learn to put my total trust in God, the lesson my mother had taught me. 

In John’s Gospel, Jesus says:  

I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. (John 14: 6)

I hadn’t been applying these principles that I had learned so long ago.  Somehow I needed to find a very special relationship with God now. Only in that relationship could I be healed and made whole. All those years of church attendance were empty without a personal relationship with God. Only after developing a relationship with the Lord would the wholeness of healing my body, mind, and spirit be complete.

I grew up in a Lutheran church, and there I had a closer relationship with God than I have had for the last 40 years. In my hectic married life, there never seemed to be enough time in my demanding schedule for me to put God first, to put Him above all things and to serve Him fully.

This feeling of not having enough time for God had haunted me for a lifetime. In my case, and perhaps in your case, a lifetime is gone before you know it.

Now I realized there was no other way than to put God first in my life. I had been pretending and procrastinating about turning my life around for too long. Now was the time for me to completely and unconditionally turn myself over to the Lord and to really let God into my heart. John and I had carried the burdens of worry and stress on our own shoulders too long rather than letting God carry our burdens.

I had read this: “I am God. When you turn something over to me, forget it. I am now in charge. I don’t need your help.” 

Too often we tend to take our burdens back without giving God a chance to work on the problem in His own time and at His own pace. The Bible says:

He cares for the orphans and widows. (Psalm 146:9, NLT)       

All I had left to hold on to was the faith that God would take care of me, if I would just let him. Just as I had been taught, God was waiting for me to come to Him. The answers would come if I prayed and learned to listen—really listen this time, let God guide me as a lost widow. Just as the Bible says, He searches for all His lost sheep. It would take time and patience to once again find peace within my life and within myself. It would have to be in God’s time, not mine.

Thanksgiving came and went. At the end of November, my husband had been gone four weeks. On a cold, damp morning, I walked out onto the back porch of my home and dropped into a comfortable old lounge chair. Tears filled my eyes and trickled down my face as I slumped and shivered in the cold. Every moment leading up to John’s death was still so fresh in my mind. The storm, the phone call, the frantic search of hospitals, the doctor’s words; these scenes kept playing across the video screen in my mind.
Then the mental video played the events of the past month over and over again. Could I have done anything differently that would have saved John’s life? Was it really God’s will that John should be taken from me by death? Was I destined to spend the rest of my life endlessly replaying the mental video of the shock, grief, trauma of the last four weeks?

I looked up and saw grey clouds drifting overhead. Down below, I huddled in the old chair and wept alone. The clouds seemed to pick up speed as they came ever so close to me. Then I cried to the Lord, “God, you can have everything I own—this beautiful country home John and I worked so hard for … our business … all our earthly possessions. Please take them all. They mean nothing to me.”

As Jesus says in Luke 6:19-26, we’re blessed when we’ve lost it all. God’s kingdom is there for the finding. We’re blessed when we’re ravenously hungry. Then we’re ready for the messianic meal. We’re blessed when the tears flow freely. Joy comes in the morning.
I felt my passion for living grow as I sat on the cold, damp porch. Wet with tears, humbled and weak, I told God the desires of my heart. First, I asked for more faith. Second, I wanted to share the love that I had given to my husband John with other people. Third, I wanted to appreciate violin music; even with a music background I didn’t like or understand it.

In an instant, I felt calm and peace permeate my soul as my confusion and the pressures of my life drained out of me. God was faithful. He had sent the Holy Spirit to calm the raging storms inside of me. God had given me another chance, and, as I would discover, He had answered my prayer requests then and there.

He had indeed given me the gift of faith. The veil that had covered my eyes all these years was lifted from my eyes. I began to see a different world around me. I felt a feeling of warmth and love that I never had experienced before surrounding me.

Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done. Then you will experience God’s peace, which exceeds anything we can understand. His peace will guard your hearts and minds as you live in Christ Jesus. (Philippians: 4:6-7)

No one on this earth could help me like God. No one. How thankful I was for my Christian upbringing and for what I had learned from the vision my mother had shown me. How thankful I was that I believed.

Yes, there really is a God, and He wants a personal relationship with me and with you.
The low grey clouds that had been hovering over me suddenly disappeared. I knew God had been there with me, and He had heard my cry, my pleas. The calmness and peace that had come over me deepened.