No details, none necessary.

I am just at this point in my life where I can’t take any amount of unnecessary anythings.

Being in a building with people with whom I share only a name is not part of my life statement anymore.

Being somewhere just for the sake of being, just for the sake of filling in a morning every week does not sit well with me anymore.

I am here to help with whatever I can.

Alex and I will have our home open on Christmas evening to whoever feels down, lovely or friendless. If you have nowhere to go that evening, let us know and we will provide you with a warm meal and a friendly chat, here, in our home.

We have both agreed, after numerous and very open, heart to heart discussions, that we will use the experience of the past number of months to be church to people who need it most. But we cannot play church anymore. Seeing a son die sharpens your awareness to genuineness , sensitivity to suffering and leaves zero tolerance to “for the sake of…”

I do not know where this will lead.

I am not cutting our ties with the friends we have in church, the ones who have been there for us during, and most importantly, after Georgie died. But I am cutting my ties with an institution which for me has proved redundant in the front of grief, pain and failure.(We have been failures, we were unable to be and provide the community with a miracle.) An institution which has shrugged its shoulders once my boy died and left us where we were, with no answers and no comfort. It has been the general attitude, from over so many churches praying and so many ministers coming to visit with Georgie and pray over him for miracles and healing and…blah…blah…blah…do you know how many visited with us afterwards? NONE.

I do not know where this will lead.

I am grateful to the members of the church who showed us love and provided for our practical needs during our ordeal this year. Each and every name is inscribed into my heart and I will be forever in debt to them, for stepping in the way they did.

But for us now, sitting in church and listening to any sort of sermon only leads to more questions and more pain. Everything is filtered through the prism of our boy’s death. So any statements like “God is love” which we would have accepted without questioning before July is now met in our hearts with waves upon waves of…anger, heartache, doubt.

Maybe we need a church for the grieved only. For the hurt. For the maimed.

The church as it stands now is, at its best, a social club where people go to make/meet friends and exchange pleasantries. It is no longer the place for heartache. Pain, questioning, anger…they have no place in it anymore. There is no training courses in pain. I don’t think there should be any, anyway…There should be just hearts that care and ears that listen and hands that do. Simple as that.

I still love God. He is my only Hope. He holds my boy tight for me until the day I will see him again. He will, in His own time, show me the way out of this horrible, horrible, stabbing pain that has left me for dead, that has robbed me of any joy and desire to stay on this earth.

But for now, I am sorry, Lord, you will have to do. Only you. YOU deal with the rest. I can’t. I refuse to “be an example”, to “be strong”, to “be used” for your glory. Cause you know it for being true, what I am going to say, anyway. People don’t want to change. They like their lives as they have them. And I am done fighting for a lost cause. If you want them changed, you do it. Use THEIR experiences, not mine, to change them.

I am done.

I have had my share of pain, now it is time to step aside and take time to heal.

To just be with my memories.

To just be.