Life

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.