The other evening I set out for a sad walk, not to count my joys, but to mourn my sorrows—the cancer diagnosis of someone young and dear to me; the precariousness of life for the old, especially my parents whose knees and eyes and shoulders and body systems show their ninety years; the anguish of friends who struggle with broken relationships and poor mental health; the ravages of war; and the fractured American church.
The weight of these thoughts fell on me, and it seemed all energy had drained from my life. I must have looked like a hunched-over old woman plodding down Main. And, come to think of it, that’s exactly what I was.
Absorbed in troubles, I didn’t at first notice when a fancy black car pulled over along the road beside me.
“Mrs. Swartz, is that you?”
The voice was a little doubtful. And no wonder. I looked a hundred years older than when he had seen me last, walking school hallways with a jaunt.
It was Asher. I could still recognize his middle-school face. While I had grown old, Asher had grown up. There he was in his fancy car with his girlfriend, both of them alert, lively, and full of hope.
“Couldn’t tell if that was you,” Asher said. “But I stopped just in case. Wanted to say that you changed me from a rowdy, always-in-trouble kid to one who cared.”
Asher had just become a police officer in our town, and his girlfriend had just started medical school, aiming to be a surgeon.
“I’ll keep you safe,” Asher said, before he pulled back into traffic. “That’s my new job.”
His girlfriend leaned over him toward the window.
“And if you need surgery,” she said, “I’ll cut you open.”
Their words didn’t change cancer or old age and didn’t solve the problems of broken relationships and poor mental health and war and a divided church.
But they did change the rest of my walk.
At my age, I’m supposed to be wise. But I had been forgetting to embrace the view of the world in which opposites are joined, to see the world whole, not only with dewy-eyed romanticism or with only steel-eyed realism. I had lost track that life has two sides. One light. The other shadowed.
Like Asher, who had once brought me sorrow but now brought me joy.
On my walk home, I was still old, but no longer hunched over and plodding.
Apple to Apple 
Dear sister, your mourning is a sign of your deep love for those in your life–and I was the recipient of that love last December when I was at Cleveland Clinic. Thank you for caring for all of us! –Kevin
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I am blessed by your “ Mourning Walk”. Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts in such an eloquent way. You reminded me of myself and how often I have been weighed down with sorrow. Then I remember that our loving God knows what is best for us, and I am comforted. Keep on writing, dear friend.
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