my most meaningful moment of 2011

one of the most difficult aspects of living overseas is not being able to participate in the natural rhythm of your family's life both the joy and the sorrows. sisters have babies and you can't be there to hold them. parents get sick and you can't camp out in their hospital room. friends graduate or get married and everyone but you gets to give them a hug. relatives die and you grieve in a Parisian park instead of at the graveside. it is hard.

this year my uncle passed away. when they diagnosed him pancreatic cancer, I knew he didn't have much time. just a few weeks before he died, i stopped by his house and spent the afternoon with him. i hadn't seen him in years. he looked so different, so frail. i remember him as a hard working man who used to sway while he talked. now he was hunched over and lost in a cloud of morphine. i knew when i said goodbye to him that it would be the last time i saw him.

his cancer was unexpected. my time with him before he went was a gift. what my aunt asked of me before i left was a shock. after a puzzling question about my "minister's papers," she asked if i would officiate at his funeral. she could have asked me to triple jump to the moon and i would have been less surprised. when her request finally found a place to dock, i admit that my first thoughts were panic-filled.

oh my gosh, i have never done a funeral.
what if i mess it up?
what if i start to cry?
has she really thought this through?
why me?

why me? i'm the minister in the family. when my cousin got engaged, he wanted me to perform the ceremony. now that my uncle was dying, they wanted me to officiate. that's why me.

three weeks later my uncle died.

i could tell you about my funeral preparations, my freak out about what to wear, the tire i blew out on my way to austin or the fact that a dallas cowboy legend was in the audience, but those things aren't what was significant to me. the funeral went fine. i didn't stutter or cry or put people to sleep. i am so thankful everyone was pleased with the service. no those things are not what touched me in a place i didn't know needed touching.

i got to be present. not only did my physical body get to be with my family as they grieved but i got to be present in a spiritually and emotionally significant way. i went down two days before the funeral at my family's request. as we sat around a table, i got to listen as they told story after story about my uncle. we cried together. we laughed together. we talked about hope and love and life in God. we reconnected. in mere seconds all the years that i had been away disappeared. i was there. do you have any idea what that means to a person who spent a decade living over there?

i don't live near my family. perhaps i never will. but i can assure you that i will hoard those together-moments in my heart.

i am so thankful for my aunt and cousins. they gave me an extraordinary gift, one of my most treasured of 2011.

with my sister and cousins

in the middle of family