Anniversaries

The fourth, thirteenth, fifteenth, and twenty-first days of June have special meaning to me. My life was profoundly changed on those dates - though in different years. I have marked time in some form or another with each of those days as the beginning point of a unique journey into uncharted territories. They are all anniversary dates of some sort. Some were planned, while others were not, but there is a common thread that runs through them all. The map for my life that I had sketched proved to be useless for each and every one of them.

This past June fourth, I celebrated my twentieth wedding anniversary. Twenty years ago, I made a vow to God that I would love, honor and cherish my wife through sickness and health, through good times and bad, through poor times and times of plenty, until death parted us. I was eager to make that promise, but I had no real understanding of what it meant. Sure, I had a romantic love for my bride, but it became obvious that my romantic notions were wholly inadequate in the times of sickness, the bad times, and the times of poverty. It wasn’t long into married life that I took my life map off the table and put it in my back pocket.

That map in my back pocket was shredded into tiny little pieces by two words on Wednesday, June 13th, 2001. The words were “She’s gone.” She was my mother, and gone didn’t mean a vacation – it meant she had died. She was killed instantly in an automobile accident. She was a tremendous spiritual mentor, and an amazing encourager. I had no idea how I would do life without Mom. Yet, as I stood next to her lifeless body, I experienced a peace and comfort that I had never experienced before. It was a peace and comfort that I needed to cling to over the following two days. The fifty hours that followed my mother’s death were alternated between grieving with my wife, children, and sister, and being at my dad’s bedside at the hospital. He had sustained serious injuries in the same accident, and during that time, Dad’s prognosis changed every hour. His Heart was broken at the news that his bride of nearly forty-one years had died. That coupled with the multiple significant injuries he suffered in the accident was just too much to overcome. On Friday, June 15th, 2001, as I knelt at the side of a hospital bed holding my dad’s badly swollen arm, he died.

In a matter of a couple of days, I had gone from discussing paint colors with clients to planning a double funeral with my wife, my sister, and my brother-in-law. I was in completely foreign territory. I liken it to a person who has been blindfolded and dropped off at an undisclosed location. I had no sense of bearing and no idea in which direction to take the first step that day, let alone the following weeks and months. Life was dramatically different.

This June 21st was the one-year anniversary of moving my family from Illinois to Wisconsin. It has been a journey of leaving family, church, friends, and my job. For my wife it has been a homecoming; for me it has been a trip into the unknown. My life map that had been shredded years earlier hadn’t been put in the trash. I had saved all of the pieces in a bag, so to speak. Over the last year I have tried to put them together in puzzle fashion, salvaging the parts that I thought were good. Well, let’s just put it this way: they have been burned up. It seems that the ideas I had for my life have gone up in smoke…which leads me back to that common thread that runs through all these dates for me.

One thing I’ve learned through these experiences is that life is unpredictable and my plans unreliable. I have also learned that these dates are anniversaries for lessons of trust that God placed before me. God’s grace is the reason for twenty years of marriage, and - Lord willing - many more. It was He that spoke peace and comfort into my life when it was turned upside down when my parents were killed. He provided everything I needed to navigate through those days and times that followed. It was He that called me to move, and it is He that is providing a larger life for me – a life much larger than I dared chart for myself.

God has been showing me that even when I came to realize that He was in control and His plans were best, I was still guilty of holding onto my plans in one form or another. But, if my map was in my back pocket, He shredded it. If I salvaged some pieces of it from a bag, He burned them up. These anniversary dates remind me of how serious God is about having me trust Him – trusting Him at a level profoundly deeper than I have trusted Him before. He wants me to trust Him completely. He wants you to trust Him that way too.

Grace to you.

Dave Paukner