Not Goodbyes

I feel like my family has been in Lent for a year… but we also see the goodness of God’s leading us through the wilderness.

By Robin Jester Wootton

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little over a year ago, I woke up to see that my cell phone had several missed calls and voicemails. I didn’t recognize the number. It was my mother-in-law’s pastor, and he asked for us to call back. I knew immediately something was wrong. Patti had been in a car accident. She passed instantly. I will never forget that phone call.

2020 was difficult for everyone for a hundred reasons. My family’s 2020 was difficult for a hundred reasons. We mourned the loss of my husband’s mom. She had actually been on the way to the airport to come see us, and we were supposed to look at houses to buy so she could move in with us. I was looking forward to travelling with her in the future, when our kids were older, to explore the world as she had. We hadn’t seen her for several months because she had been to the Holy Land for the holidays, and she was bursting to tell us all about it. We’ll have to wait to hear the stories. 

2020 started with losing her and ended with losing our jobs. In between was conflict, heated arguments with others about health codes and restrictions and personal rights and politics and conspiracies, and, somewhere in there, the Gospel. 

The overly optimistic of us will jump in here: “Now, Robin, you know that God works for good, and you know that he loves you.” I know. Of course, I know. But you can know something through and through while still feeling the weight of the now and the not yet. Did Jesus not know how much the Father loved him? Did he not know that he would rise again in three days? Didn’t he have us—me!—in mind even as he wept? He did. He knew it all through and through. But he cried drops of blood for the agony and stress of it all. 

In some ways, I feel like my family has been in Lent for a year. We feel like the one crying out in the wilderness. But God does some pretty good work in the wilderness. It’s really all I have to cling to these days, that God is working. That God is refining me and my husband. That God is burning down all the things that we keep building up so that we depend totally on him and worship him only. All our golden calves one by one melted down and destroyed—even those things we didn’t recognize as golden calves— until all we have is Jesus. This happens in the wilderness. And so, in the wilderness we stay. I wish I could say for how many days more. 40 days have come and gone. 40 years seems a bit too long for us. 40 weeks? 40 months? We’ll see. We’ll hope. We’ll pray. In the meantime, we’ll come to enjoy manna. 

God reminds us, when we remember to look for them, that good things happen too. We can’t say the whole year was bad. There were glimmers. My husband and I found and bought a beautiful home, and in the midst of COVID lockdowns, we quietly moved in. We were able to still meet with small groups, and dream together of a new church, and see what God was doing in our hearts. We got to explore the beautiful country here in Montana and thoroughly relish the sight of mountains, and glaciers, and majesty. We got several extra months with our son when his college went into lockdown, and that was beyond priceless. 

Those didn’t negate the hardships. We don’t have to deny the sad things for the sake of good things. We shouldn’t. We see the reality of the wilderness, but we also see the goodness of God’s leading us through the wilderness. We don’t say goodbye to the pain. The pain reminds us of our need to heal. We don’t say goodbye to the hurt. The hurt reminds us that people will always fail us but Jesus never will. We don’t say goodbye to 2020. 2020 pointed us to Jesus in ways we never would have asked for, but desperately needed. We don’t say goodbye to Patti. We will see her again. Oh, glorious day. 

Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash

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Robin Jester Wootton is a child of God, wife, mom, stepmom, church planter, musician, blogger, breach restorer. Adopted from Korea at 6 months old, lived a lot of life before getting married for the first and last time at age 39, gave birth to her first child at 40 and second at 42. She is a pastor's wife and has served as a Music Director for 10 years. They currently live in Billings, Montana, and are regrouping from a "failed" church plant because 2020. Her blog is at robinwootton.wordpress.com and she can be found in the usual social places.