The Never Ending Ending

4 years ago I wrote this post :: And then sometimes….. its just the end.

When I wrote that post 4 years ago, what I thought was terrible and messy and ending was actually just the very start of an ending that just doesn’t seem to end.

I didn’t know then that my marriage was ending and would end in divorce in 2017. I didn’t know that 4 years later I would say the words “my husband is getting remarried, I mean my ex. husband”

I didn’t know that I would sit and type this in my “writing corner” and look out over my prayer garden, who has had a rough 4 years, but has hung in there. I can see the stones the give the prayer garden shape, I can see the plants that I attempt to keep alive, I know that one fish survived the cottonmouth that moved in last year and is hiding among the plants and I can see just the tip top of a beautiful yellow lily blooming with all it has. The first plant I ever bought, the one being decimated in the post, keeps blooming and growing and just absolutely refuses to give up. In this last 4 years the prayer garden has been refreshed and restructured and has yet to make it back to what it once was. I look out upon my prayer garden and I remember what it once was, what it once looked like, vibrant and full of life, strong and beautiful and able to weather so many storms…. and I am sad. But then when I really look and I make myself stop wanting what once was, I see strength, resolve, hope and perserverance and I see a place that has suffered and lost and struggled but hasn’t once forgotten it’s purpose. A sanctuary.

I didn’t know that 4 years later I would still be looking for the final messy end. I didn’t know how many times I would look with deep need and anticipation to a new beginning or how many times I would think, ok, now this, this, is really the end.

I think once you spend half a lifetime wih someone the end is impossibly hard to find. Kids, family, friends, love, the Lord, home, life, just life, spending 23 years with someone in any capacity, makes it so very hard to really be at the end. Not that I ever had false hope or held onto ideas of a reconcilliation, but every new “thing” revealed a new messy end and I would realize the end before, wasn’t really the end. The never ending ending.

So here I am 4 years later reading what I wrote 4 years ago and I remember how sad and painful the ending I was experiencing really was. I had no way to know the endings that were getting ready to crash over me. Today was the first time I spoke all the things out loud, in a sequential order to another person. Listing out in rather rapid sucession the painful messy ugly endings…. ending with the information that in a few weeks my husband will marry someone else.

And today, just as much, if not more than 4 years ago, I need to know, that my El Shaddai watches over me. That He sees and knows and is not caught off guard by any ending, no matter how ugly or messy or never ending. Even more beautifully, He has so many beautiful beginnings ahead, no matter how many I need. Through all the never ending endings I haven’t once forgotten, because He is faithful to remind me, daily, through His Word, the people He sends to love and care for me and my Sanctuary, I am His beloved.