Second Week at Ellerslie

We are entering our second week at Ellerslie. God is really ripping my heart apart in order to bring healing to me. It seems that every area that was so important to Gary and me in ministry, I am being led through the agony and the healing of facing it. I cannot even begin to describe what has been happening in my heart but honestly in every area of intimacy in the Spirit that Gary and I shared together and the depth of our Christian walk together, I am being led through each aspect by the Spirit and he is bringing healing to the depths of my soul.

I realize now what a huge area of grief that had remained in my heart. It was an area that I tucked carefully away and labeled, “Gary and Rachel’s spiritual life together”.  In the past 7 months I have gone through so many areas of grief. I have forced myself to face each aspect of my love for my beloved husband. I cannot even begin to list each area of grief that I have faced and worked through during these nearly 7 months. And yet one huge area remained and that was my spiritual walk with my husband. I think I ignored this because it was so very deeply painful. And now I am face to face with it and it is good but also covered in sorrow.  

This afternoon (Sunday) we at Ellerslie had a corporate time of seeking God and meditating on scripture from 1:00-3:30. As I lay on my bed with my Bible, Bethany sat outside in the grass (it was a beautifully warm day!) and Nathaniel sat out by the lake on a park bench, I realized how “normal” this was for our family. On any given Sunday during our life together with Gary, we would all go to church together and then come home for our family worship and Bible study. No matter where we went to church our children always considered “Dad” to be their pastor. It was simply never a question in their mind even though we never gave him this title in our home. Most times we would have family worship and then an hour to an hour and a half of an intense Bible study. Other times we would separately seek God. But always Sunday afternoon and evening was a set apart time for the things of God.

Every Sunday until Gary died that is…….Suddenly our lives changed drastically. Suddenly every hymn or passage of scripture brought huge tsunamis of grief. We knew how to seek God separately but not alone. Let me explain. We as a couple learned how to deeply seek God together as well as on our own but always always always we were a unit. If I was seeking God in the kitchen and Gary was seeking God in our bedroom, we may be apart but we were still a team, a unit, and we were “together” even though we weren’t in the same room. When we had children we developed in them the same ability to seek God deeply, go to the Word in study and on our faces before Jesus in prayer. Yet, even if I had my intense prayer time at 5:00 am and Nathaniel had his intense prayer time at 8:00 am and Gary and Bethany a different time, we were still all in unity and all doing the same type of seeking although sometimes at different hours of the day. After Gary died we felt such a loss of that unity. Suddenly Gary and I weren’t a unified team any more. Suddenly I was alone and the felt spiritual isolation was more than I could bear. Suddenly the source of my greatest joy and comfort became the source of my greatest sorrow and grief. The spiritual aspect of my marriage was the most precious ingredient of our life together and I couldn’t face the grief of the tremendous loss.

And yet, God is faithful to complete His work within us. Here we are at Ellerslie being “forced” to face each area of our spiritual life with Gary and the pain of grief is deep. The orchestration of the Spirit is amazing. No one at Ellerslie knew Gary and me prior to his death. They have no idea what specific aspects were vital to us, yet each and every area is being dealt with whether it’s easy or not.

For instance, tonight we had a tremendous worshipful evening. It was full of the intimacy that defines true worship and entering into the Holy of Holies. One of the things that they did was read a list of names of God. “Deliverer, Redeemer, Savior,” etc etc. What is amazing about this is that the study of the Names of God was one of Gary’s delights and passions. He also wrote Psalms or poems if you will on different names of God. Actually, my very first memory of Gary that set him apart from everyone else was when he was leading a retreat that I attended. During worship, without any fanfare or interruption, Gary picked up his folder of his list of names of God and quietly began to read them out loud. It brought such a sweet spirit of worship into the room that I’ve never forgotten that moment. At every family retreat day that we had and every weekend “Feast of Tabernacles” celebration we always had the names of God binder sitting out so that the four of us could access it in our personal worship. I’ve never once been in a corporate church setting where the names of God were read as Gary had read them 19 years ago at a single’s retreat in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, until tonight!

God is just taking us through every aspect of our spiritual life with Gary and gently guiding us through facing our grief and giving us back this extremely precious area of our life.

This afternoon as we were all seeking God, I realized what this will accomplish in our lives after spending two months here at Ellerslie. No longer will Rees Howells and Andrew Murray represent Gary and our life with him but it will be part of the wonderful memories of Ellerslie. We will once again be in the habit of seeking God on a Sunday afternoon and it won’t be filled with agony of loss but memories of sweet fellowship here in Windsor. The teaching of who we are “In Christ”, the teaching of the power of grace, and the love and focus on the truth of scripture will no longer solely remind us of our loss in Gary but will be full of new memories of these 9 weeks.

This is totally a spirit led season of dealing with our grief and it is amazing. The way a person works through grief is to face each aspect of our life with our beloved, grieve its loss and then go on to either make it solely our own and not something that we must share with our beloved or leave it nicely in the past full of the memories of our life together. I cannot believe how tailor made this is for us to work through our grief in this area.

I don’t want to minimize the depth of teaching and how glorious it is to dwell in the presence of God 24/7 on this campus. Yet, working through grief is all part of that. We cannot really serve God if we are broken and dysfunctional people. God desires his people to work through the areas of brokenness and dysfunction in order to seek him in fullness walking in emotional and spiritual health. So as we are literally on our faces before God he is taking us through these areas of grief, which can “sound” too clinical but in reality it isn’t clinical in the slightest.

Therefore, this evening was the most powerful and intimate corporate worship night that I’ve ever been a part of. Yet, a large section of the evening, well to be honest, the entire evening I was focused in my prayers and in my worship on grief. It was a God ordained focus as he works his healing grace into my heart. Ironically the scripture that was interwoven into the worship was the “Song of Solomon”! Cough……sputter….weep….and wail....! I mean really! What could be a more painful message to a grieving widow than the Song of Solomon??? Yet, God used it deeply in my heart to shower me with his presence as lover of my soul. It was an amazing time of deep worship that I will treasure the rest of my life.  I am seeing Jesus in a way that I never saw Him before. I have been a servant of God and a worshipper of the Most High but I’ve never really grasp my position and delight in being the bride of Christ. During this season of intense focus I am beginning to understand in my Spirit a tiny bit about what being the bride of Christ means. I never pursued it before because I was the “Bride of Gary” and we sought and served our God together. But now that I am alone the ever present truth of being the Bride of Christ is coming alive to me.

So even though the “grief work” is intense, the healing power of God is greater still. He is pouring his presence upon me in amazing ways and I praise Him for his love and his grace upon our lives.