Good morning and hello friends,
Let’s go for a walk this morning and try to imagine with me.
The world’s most hated villain. Picture his face plastered on every screen, every wanted poster. Imagine the venom, the universal contempt spoken over dinner tables and bar counters. The collective desire for his ruin.
Now imagine I am that man.
In that life, a life of deserved infamy, of causing misery, I would have had one ally. One unwavering soul in my corner. Not approving of my actions, but loving the actor. Someone whose belief in me would remain unshaken by the world’s verdict. That person would have been my mom.
She was the fixed point in a chaotic universe. The one phone call you could make from rock bottom, knowing the voice on the other end would answer. Not with approval, but with a love that asked no questions because its foundation was laid before you could even speak. She was my lifelong witness, my constant, my living archive of every version of myself.
She took her last breath yesterday.
And this is the void that opens: to suddenly feel alone in a way you have never felt before. It is a tectonic shift in your emotional geography. You know, intellectually, you are not alone. You have family. You have friends. You have a heavenly Father who is “near to the brokenhearted.” The verses are true. The promises are solid.
But it is not the same.
That is the honest, heretical truth of it this morning. The love of God is perfect, infinite, unconditional. Yet it is not maternal. It does not come with the specific, earthly history of her hands, her voice, her remembered scent. God’s love is the sun…all-encompassing, life-giving, absolute. A mother’s love was the hearth, the specific, contained flame around which you warmed your small, cold hands. You can stand in the broad daylight and still feel the chill of that fire’s absence.
So many times, I’d call home from the darkest places, spiritually, physically…with nothing to say beyond a simple, “Hi, Mom.” I’d dial her number with no other words in mind, just to hear the voice of the one who had always comforted me. And she could tell, from the mere sound of that “Hi, Mom,” exactly what my heart needed to hear. Without context, not even knowing where I was or what I was going through, she always knew the exact thing to say. It was usually a Bible passage. I didn’t know the Bible in those days, but the words were always what I needed to hear to keep strong, to endure.
I am surrounded by uncertainty on every front. In my work, my future, the very practical next steps of this week. If I dwell on it, if I stare into that abyss, I will fall in. The pit of depression is not a metaphor; it is a real gravity. Anxiety is a current that wants to pull me under.
So my plan for today, and for every day that follows, is simple. It is not grand. It is not a sweeping declaration of healed grief.
My plan is to keep my eyes on Jesus.
Not for a miracle of feeling. Not for the void to be miraculously filled. But for Him to guide my feet since my heart is too heavy to navigate.
I will follow the steps He lays before me. Just the next one. Then the next. The will of the Father today is not for me to understand the loss. It is for me to do the next right thing. Make the phone call. Sign the paper. Show up. Eat the meal. Breathe.
This is the coping. It is not a bypass of the pain. It is a cordon around it. I acknowledge the vast, empty space where her allegiance once stood. I honor the loneliness of being a son without a mother in a world that still spins.
But I will not set up camp in that emptiness. I will walk through it. One step, laid by Christ, at a time.
Her love was my first and most tangible lesson in grace. Now her absence is my most painful lesson in dependence. I leaned on her constancy; now I must learn to lean on His, even when it feels less like a shoulder and more like a narrow path through a dark valley.
The villain has lost his one defender. The son has lost his first home. The world feels less anchored today.
But the steps are still there, laid out before me. Today, that is enough. Today, I will look for her in the memories, and I will look for Him in the next step.
That is the plan.
That is all, and thank you for reading.
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Shashue Monrauch
My words feel utterly useless for a person I don’t really know, and the distance that separates us. My thoughts have been on you this past week. What comes to mind:
You’re sitting in the silence of uncertainty—on the edge of one chapter ending and another not yet visible—and God seems quiet.
In moments like this, the silence can feel unbearable because everything in us wants movement, clarity, or relief. But there is a kind of waiting that is not abandonment. It is the quiet tension of a soldier in the barracks before the next assignment: awake, dressed, ready, but unable to move until the word comes.
Perhaps it is the hard and holy pause between missions.
The place where a weary soul learns that it does not need to force the next step before it is given.
For now, breathe.
Mourn fully.
Do not rush the silence to make it say something.
Even soldiers at rest are still under the eye of their Commander.”
I'll continue to pray. I felt something when similar when my wife died at the end of 2019. Somehow, in my grief, I made a hard turn toward Jesus, asking that He'd meet my need. He far surpassed that. 2020 ended up as the best year of my life, and they have kept on getting better. He has what you need, and all you need to do is turn like a little child into his arms and His presence. He is more than enough.
Isaiah 53: 3
"He was despised and rejected by men;
a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not."
He's got the T-shirt >grin<