The previous
week has been one of the most emotional of my life. That Wednesday night, Mark and I had to put
down our beloved great dane, Maynard, who had been a part of our family since
Mark and I married almost 10 years ago. My house felt and still feels empty without
a giant horse of a dog lying on the couch. For a decade, every event that took
place in our home had had the company of Maynard. Every major decision that was
made, every laughter-filled movie night, every argument I ever had with my
husband, every deep conversation, there was always a giant dog in one of our
laps. He had joined me at cross country
practices and even at school. He was at
the last family celebration where my Papa was alive and is in the last picture
with all his other grandchildren. He was
the loyal companion that accompanied us along the first decade of our adult
life. Someday we will be in our 80s and
will have had other pets and been on other journeys. But this first 10 years of adulthood will
always be remembered as The Maynard Era. So Thursday I cried and slept, and cried some
more, and slept some more.
Then Friday
we braved an ice storm to get to Memphis for my mom’s first half marathon. We had been looking forward to this weekend
since June. I was welcoming the
distraction, and was so excited to get to see Mom as well as other friends and
some of my team get to run. That night
at dinner we got the word that they had decided to cancel. Mom was devastated: all that work, all that
sacrifice, and now no race, no reward.
For months I had been coaching her, giving her encouragement, telling
her it was worth it; I had watched her win so many little victories: the first
6 miler, the first 8, the first 10! One Saturday she showed up at the track
where I was coaching needing me to stretch her hips,(which ask any of my
runners and they’ll tell you that’s a very painful, though sometimes necessary
task.) That day she had run her first
12! She doubted herself for months, but I
remember the day when she finally believed she would be able to run the whole
thing. As her coach I had always known what to say, but there we were Friday
night sitting at the Macaroni Grill, Mom’s bawling, and I have nothing I can
tell her, no coach’s words can make this disappointment go away. This 4 month journey we’d been on wasn’t
going to have its epic conclusion.
So I’ve been
thinking a lot this week about journeys and eras. The Maynard decade. Mom’s marathon
training. It’s easy to reduce it down to
the beginning or the end. But when the end is heartbreaking, you force yourself
to think about the middle, why it was all still worth it. After all, it’s not the race that earns you
the 13.1 sticker; it’s the months of mile after every grueling mile of
training. And it’s not the ending of a
pet’s life that leaves a mark; it’s the thousands of joy-filled moments that
came before. This Christmas season we
celebrate the beginning of our Savior’s life.
Every week at the Communion table, we reflect on the end of His
life. I kept thinking of these verses
this week: “I am the alpha and omega, the first and the last, the beginning and
the end.” And “I came that you might have life, and have it more abundantly.” He is the beginning and He is the end so we
can have an incredible middle. He is the
beginning and the end, so that for us it can be about the journey. The Maynard era was abundant. Mom’s training
was abundant. The abundant life is not a series of beginnings and endings; the
abundant life is just that: LIFE: the middle, the journey, the era.
