Wide Open Spacious Places and Trees

Today is my mom’s 73rd birthday. It is her 24th birthday with Jesus.  Linda Sue Hetz. This year I am tearful remembering her. 

 I wrote this blog in 2013 to commemorate the birth of Linda’s first great-grandchild. 

 http://www.goministry.net/blog/2013/9/10/redeemed-beautiful-family-tree

 My family tree.  Redeemed and beautiful.  What I didn’t know at the time was that my tree was about to receive some fire destruction. Limbs would be torn off and my life would again endure another pruning. I would loose family and friends and descend into a dark place of depression. 

I felt like I had failed. Failed at life. Failed at what I pictured as the picture perfect redemption of generational curses and family brokenness.  I thought my losses and destruction meant the end of all that could be good and true and holy and family in my life. 

Little did I know the freedom that was awaiting Me. Wide Open Spacious Places.  My life verse is Job 26:36. 

"He is wooing you from the jaws of distress to a spacious place free from restriction, to the comfort of your table laden with choice food.” 

I had no idea the freedom that was to come. The freedom to be the Me that had become tamed and well behaved and comfortable in the shadow of other people. Proper and cleaned up. Making a splash but never a wave. 

I had no idea that I would come out of that depression and darkness looking more and more like Linda Sue! She was a rebel in her time. She was bra-burning and outspoken. She was the woman working in a male dominated profession. She was a lover of all the broken people and the outcasts and those rejected by their families. She ticked people off because she accumulated the misfits and loved them around the dinner table filled with choice food. 

Here I am now. 52 years old and 24 years without my mom’s physical presence in her life. I won’t sugar coat it. She battled alcoholism and it eventually took her life. She said the most terrible hurtful things you could ever imagine anyone speaking to another human being, let alone a mother to her daughter. She caused wounds in my soul that I carry to this day. 

 Yet, she was fierce and outspoken and a lover of all the messy people. She was a kick-ass cook and when she loved you, she loved you hard. She stood strong and battled against misogyny and racism. My biracial sisters and I watched her struggle to death against alcohol and struggle to life to be her own person. 

She was not a pew sitting Christian. Much of my life with her would be described as the opposite of clean and proper Christianity. Yet, as I look back now, all these years later, much of how she lived her life was so much more like Jesus than pew sitting, religious people I know.  I think of the book of Esther in our Holy Scriptures. The name of God was never physically written but the work of God is written into the very DNA of Esther’s story. And so it is with Linda Sue. 

I recently had someone tell me that I am turning more and more like my mom. There was a day that I would have been embarrassed by that. I would have done everything for that to not be true. 

 Yet, here I am on her 73rd birthday proud to be the daughter of Linda Sue Hetz. Proud to be emulating her. A voice for the underdog who doesn’t fit into a mold. A church and political misfit. Cooking choice food for the outcasts to sit around the table and talk about faith and meaning and grace and love. 

Seven years after my original blog post about a redeemed family, Linda Sue now has five great-grandchildren. I know she would just adore them.  I like to think of her resting her tired soul with Jesus as one in my Cloud of Witnesses. My redeemed family looks very different than it did back then. The darkness has lifted and the wide open spacious places are beyond my wildest dreams.

Momma. Linda Sue. I hope you are proud. I hope as a member of my Cloud of Witnesses you look down with such joy and love at your legacy. Today I celebrate you. I love you, Linda Sue.