I am alone. I wonder what I have just done to my life. For it is too late to retreat.

I'm sitting in my mother's quiet apartment. She is gone for the evening. I am avoiding the snowy roads and the reality of the tasks for the coming holiday. I've begun Kathleen Norris' evocative "Dakota - A Spiritual Geography". She begins with this beautiful line,

 "The high plains, the beginning of the dessert West,

often act as a cruible for those who inhabit them."

A cruible, a container for the smelting process, the holder for the molten ore. Latin for "a night lamp".

This season, between one life and another, this has become my cruible.  My life was melted down to "widow".  My heart holds the heat of wounded children and my own anger. The process has brought out the ugly impurities.  Have I been a night lamp?  A light to show others the way?  Somedays, perhaps.  Many days and nights, I was too preocuppied with my fire to wonder who was behind me, watching for a light for their path of grief or transition.

But the days passed and the nights again became haven's of sleep, not restles hours aching from the clench of grief.  The children regained their balance. Their lives built forward, as it is the way.  And the house became too big, too many memories. "I will not maintain a museum to the past nor become, at last, a houseWIFE". The wife of one man, not one house. And so the process began- "Pick what you want, dispose of the rest" sounds good; the boxes  with their names is testimony to my backbone.  But slowly, the treasures emerged and the dross burned off.

So today, the death is final. The house our family built, the home my children came home to for fifteen years, is gone. Sold. Belongs to another. 

We wired that house for an intercom system by wrapping wires in ten year old Abby's toes and letting her climb in the rafters.  We rarely used the system but we love that story. We gathered on a dusty subfloor and ate pizza, delivered up a mud slide of a driveway.  In the years to come, the children terrified and impressed our guest by valet parking - and backing that steep, narrow five hundred feet at top speed. We laid in the back yard on a trampoline gazing at stars and were awed by the owl that swooped over us in a whisper of power.  We danced on the deck. The stories are endless. We made it our home.

And today it is sold. Another family will move in and make their own memories.  Ours are safely tucked away.

And I am here. In the Heartland of America. In a log home as horses graze in my pasture and coyotes yip up the ridge. I can stand on my porch at dark and look a mile away to the friendly lights of neighbors across the valley.  It is quiet. There are few memories yet.

And this too is my cruible. I have been heated by this ardorous process of transition. This striving to get that house right so someone would want what I treasured. The work to move the treasures I kept.  Stressed by paperwork, misunderstandings, forgotten permits- details I depise; yet, the fuel to consume the rising dross. Who am I? Why do I respond  this way or that?  What is the purpose of pain and suffering? Of frustration?  Why was it so hard and confusing? Where were You when I was pushed to the breaking point?

Then the radio had my a reminder of my answer.  A new song for me is Mathew West's -

                                                      "Strong Enough"

You must think I'm strong
To give me what I'm going through

Well forgive me
Forgive me if I'm wrong
But this looks like more than I can do
On my own

I know I'm not strong enough to be
everything that I'm supposed to be
I give up
I'm not stong enough

                                                    Hands of mercy won't you cover me
                                                    Lord right now I'm asking you to be
                                                    Strong enough
                                                    Strong enough
                                                    For the both of us

Well maybe
Maybe that's the point
To reach the point of giving up

Cause when I'm finally
Finally at rock bottom
Well that's when I start looking up
And reaching out

I know I'm not strong enough to be
Everything that I'm supposed to be
I give up
I'm not stong enough

Hands of mercy won't you cover me
Lord right now I'm asking you to be
Strong enough
Strong enough

Cause I'm broken
Down to nothing
But I'm still holding on to the one thing
You are God
and you are strong
When I am weak

I can do all things
Through Christ who gives me strength

And I don't have to be
Strong enough
Strong enough

I'm not a big fan of contemporay Christian music but it hit a chord tonight. I couldn't do what I've done, what our family has done on my own. I was not strong enough. I hit bottom several times. I gave up and.... His hands of mercy covered me. He was strong enough.

And he sent His children to help - to encourage, to work, to pray, to listen to me rant or cry or rant and cry together.   I didn't have to be strong enough. I have not been alone in the fire. And I am so grateful.

So in the cruible of life, I was purified, I am being purified;  I will continue to be in the fire.

I am sad and I am thrilled. I am missing my old life and excited about the new.  I watch snow flurries cover the stones that form the landscape of this new home. And I am content in my place in His world.