photo by Kelli Campbell

photo by Kelli Campbell

“Whether we speak of poems or paintings or places, all art acknowledges an absence and dreams of something other, something more. Art is the material form of hope.”

– Christie Purifoy, Roots and Sky

I did not really know what those words meant when I wrote them.

Today, my family is confronted by a terrible grief and a great absence. My brother-in-law, my sister’s husband, is missing at sea. He is a Marine and a pilot, and his aircraft was lost off the coast of Hawaii last Thursday night.

His four young children are waiting for their Daddy to come home. Soon, I will travel to Hawaii to be with them.

I had other words, other stories, planned for these last days before my book is released into the world. Instead, you will most likely find only silence in this online space. I will share any updates on my facebook page and instagram account.

It is likely that many of you will receive my book and begin reading it before I return home to Maplehurst. The only words I would add to the words already written within those pages are these:

The book I wrote is not diminished by this sorrow. It is more true than I knew, and it has become, for me, an anchor outside this grief.

It is, quite literally, the material form of my hope.

If I once thought it was my gift to God then it is a gift he has given back to me. I can hold hope in my hands, even if I fail to see it in these circumstances.

Thank you for your prayers. I speak for so many in my family when I say,

“I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and the gall. I well remember them, and my soul is downcast within me.

Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope:

Because of the Lord’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail.

They are new every morning: great is your faithfuless.

I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.'”

– Lamentations 3: 19-24

 

Art

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