An excerpt from something I wrote years ago:
Last fall we went to the mountains for a weekend. It was a mess. The girls didn’t want to leave their friends, especially the one who was fighting his demons of despair. It was stressful and none of us were getting along very well, to be honest. But, we, the parents, thought that getting away for a camping trip would be good for us all. The first night I went up with the two boys and the girls were coming to join us the next day. When we finally got settled down, and I was almost asleep, I suddenly sat upright in my makeshift bed. I literally couldn’t catch my breath. My heart was hammering a mile a minute, chest constricting. I felt like someone had taken all the anxieties and problems of the past weeks and months and poured them down my throat all at once. I honest to goodness thought I was having a heart attack. It was a beautiful, brisk, moonlit night, but I was swimming in a darkness I couldn’t define. It wasn’t merely physical. I had visions of car wrecks, visions of death, mine and the girls. I’m sure I prayed harder during the next fifteen minutes then I had in years. Finally, the oppressive force I was laboring under begin to fade. I’m not normally an especially emotional person, but I’m sure if you’d been there, you’d have thought me a basket case. I’m not normally into rebuking demons, but I was that night. When you’re desperate, you try anything you believe may have a chance of working. I suppose you could conclude this was just some kind of panic attack, although I’d never had one before. But was that really all that was going on here? Hardly. This was a spiritual battle, that was about to come to a head soon, but on that night, I finally settled down and found some semblance of peace.
The next day, the girls arrived and we spent that day wandering. Exploring. The sun was shining, the leaves were at their height of autumn beauty and the woods were nearly empty of the normal tourists. We saw a black bear. We drove two tracks we’ve never been down before. The kids rode in the back of the pickup on the dirt roads. We were a close family again, the way it was on our camping trips when we were all younger. God gave us that day. I believe He gave it to us because He knew we needed it. If I live to be 100, I will always be grateful.
I won’t go into everything that came later, but one of our daughter’s close friends took his life about a week later. I suspect in some ways we are still weathering that storm.
What am I trying to say here? For starters, grab the good times and hold them close. You don’t know what tomorrow holds. Sometimes you need the forest to prepare you for the fire. Some things nothing can prepare you for, and all you can do is hold onto God, kicking and screaming at the pain all the way. Make up your mind now that come what may, you’re not letting go.
That was a good weekend.
