It turns out that missing people is a gift

​Somewhere along the way my "I miss you" wires got short-circuited. Like, it was very easy for people to disappear from my life largely unnoticed.

And visa versa.

I never really considered that there might be some part of me that was broken. I guess I always just thought I was cold. Distant. Unattached. All of which sounds much healthier I suppose than broken, even if not completely healthy.

All of that changed, though, when my sons came along.

I was driving home Thursday afternoon in the pouring rain. It had been a long week. Home sounded inviting.

Refuge.

But what sounded most inviting was knowing Elliott would be coming over to watch Thursday night football. I had missed him since I was with both of them the previous weekend.

My weekend.

Divorce gives you plenty of options when it comes to grieving, but without question my greatest divorce grief has been missing my boys when I'm not with them. When it is not my weekend.

But what an unexpected gift in the grief. I miss them. I can say that. And feel it. And some feelings may be hard to feel but at the same time they are quite the gift to be able to feel. Because it turns out we don't miss people, their names or their roles in our lives or their titles, but rather we miss the kind of love we experienced in our connection to them that makes it very difficult to live without when it disappears.

That is a gift.

I didn't go into marriage wanting kids. Or divorce. I got both. It is quite often the unwanted things in my life I learn the most from. The things that become my greatest gifts.

I attribute that to God in my life. A God who longs for me to miss him so deeply that I will go searching for his presence even in the unwanted.

National Sons Day. I will never miss the chance to celebrate this day. For it is this day, really, that recognizes the chance I was given to miss anything at all.

Missing. It's a gift.