Selah my 4 year old called her brother “dumb” so she is now crying on the kitchen counter as I cook because she can’t watch the rest of the tv show they were watching.

We take words serious in our house. Words mean as much as, if not more than, a shove or a push. So when our kids use a word to tear down someone else’s personhood and spirit, we have consequences. Four-year-olds are no exception.

Her tears are hot and ongoing for the next hour and I keep walking over and holding her, comforting her through the pain of the consequence.

This is what mothers do, they comfort along the lessons of life.

After watching Rachel Held Evans’ funeral today, I feel my own need to be comforted. On this earth, the life, death, life cycle is not foreign to me, but when a mother, your age dies, you feel it. The heavy weight of death is more than my chest can bear after such a life has been stolen from us. I don’t weep for her resurrected body, I weep for her earthly one that doesn’t get to nurse her sweet baby before sleep tonight. I feel heavy for the empty pages she will never fill and I will never read. I grieve because she is a woman, daughter, sister, wife and mother and the idea of dying and leaving my family sounds excruciating.

Her funeral was painstakingly beautiful. The women who facilitated the service were exquisite in their knowledge of how to navigate a congregation around a tomb. Rachel’s essence and memory were so very honored. In the sermon, Mary Magdalene was a beloved archetype illustrated throughout the weeping, she was a Biblical character who knows her way around a tomb. Mary Magdalene hated death but was not going to let it stop her from living. After Jesus’ resurrected body ascends we are all left with the hope while holding the pain of living apart from Him. I feel the pain today of living apart from those who have I loved and I have had to bury. Today, my body aches and I need a Comforter to tell me that “this too will pass” and that we won’t live forever apart from our beloveds.

May my daughter in years to come, long after I am gone remember my arms around her as she wept through different seasons of life and my holding her weeping body and whispering,

“this too shall pass, we were made for glory, my love.

And glory is coming for us.”