Trying to get on with life as normal?

During the last couple of days (Wednesday and Thursday), we've been trying to get more equilibrium in our lives. The necessity of quickly needing to shift from getting prepared for the delivery of a newborn to suddenly needing to adjust to her death and preparations for her memorial service this past Saturday made for a completely different week last week than any that we've ever experienced. It was like I felt on numbed on the one hand, but also completely aware of what was happening, like it was in slow motion.

On Wednesday morning I had to go to our bank to discuss a shortage in our checking account that happnened the previous Thursday. I'm usually good at juggling funds in our accounts in order to earn as much interest as possible in our other accounts, but then have enough in checking to cover all our expenses. We had plenty of funds in another account, but I forgot to transfer them to checking. So much other stuff was going on. Fortunately, it doesn't look like the penalty will be too much financially.

I had to go to a computer store and pick up a repaired external hard drive. Thank goodness for warranties, as we ended up getting a completely new hard drive. I purchased a 8 giga thumb drive as well for transporting data. Not super glamorous act, but something that does help us accomplish what we need to do.

We had a meeting this morning with the school psychologist and school director. They wanted to know how we explained everything to our kids. We're so glad for the personnel of this school. It turns out the mother of our older daughter's teacher passed away during the vacation as well. They explained this to her class on Tuesday and many of the kids cried.

Having children forces us to get on with life. They need to eat, get dressed, get to school, etc. Their school rhythms oblige us to get on a schedule, even if we don't feel like it because of grief.

My wife spoke with one of the not-yet Christian mothers who came to the commemoration service. (She actually had seemed anti-Christian until that ceremony). She asked if the service was typical of Baptist churches. She asked about Baptist ones because she saw signs for the Baptist congregation that uses the sanctuary of the property where le Pavé d'Orsay also is located. We had to explain that our service wasn't typical for any of the churches that we know in Paris. I wish that it was...and hopefully this will change. But it's good to know that the service whet the appetite of some of our friends.

In this way, we don't want life to proceed as normal. We want to see faith communities that experience what we did this past Saturday morning. Creativity, imagination, diversity of artistic expression, joy, hope, community, biblical truth presented in captivating ways, etc. We want to be conscious of people going through hard times and offer hope and help. We want to rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep (and perhaps are more aware of the importance of this now).

This whole experience of adjusting to life without Jessica is a journey. I expect that we'll all be different people than we are now because of this journey. While we may go about the same motions (like school dropoffs and pickups), we'll perhaps do them in a different fashion. Maybe we won't be in as much of a hurry to rush off. Maybe we'll be more alert to the grief and sadness of other people. Hopefully we'll be more bold in talking about the Source of the peace that we have. I hope so.