Reflections on a Week of Distance, Loss, and Returning to First Love
This week felt like walking a long road with my heart tugged in several directions at once; motherhood, work, and the physical distance from the little lives that make my days sing. Waking up without the usual small noises, answering emails between naps and feedings, and carrying on conversations over video calls has left me tender and a little raw; the ordinary rhythms of home have been replaced by photos and hurried phone calls, and that ache of absence has been a constant companion. Yet in that very ache I’ve felt the odd comfort of being reminded how much I depend on more than my own presence: a deeper Presence holds my children when I cannot, and that truth steadies me when the day is long and the miles are many.
When news of Charlie Kirk’s death reached me, it pierced through a kind of spiritual numbness I hadn’t realized had settled over my routine faith. The story itself; a life cut short while speaking on a college campus; was shocking, and the public memorial that followed brought grief and politics and worship all braided together. The reality of his passing and the scenes from the memorial forced me to reckon with how little intensity I sometimes bring to my own faith practice; going to church and doing Christian things had begun to feel routine, comfortable, almost perfunctory, and his death felt like a painful alarm that woke me up. His widow’s public words of forgiveness, offered even as she carried unimaginable sorrow, cut through the noise and reminded me of the gospel’s strange power to answer hate with mercy.
That wake-up call sent me back in memory to the first years of my walk with Jesus; the days when love for Him was not polite or passive but alive and fierce, when I would have gladly given everything for the closeness I felt. I missed that first love: the passion that made prayer feel like breathing, the hunger to learn His Word, the simple delight of meeting Him in small moments. Over time life did what it often does, responsibilities multiplied, routines calcified, devotion sometimes reduced to obligation, and I realized I had become spiritually complacent in ways that words alone hadn’t shown me. Charlie’s death, and especially the posture of mercy and faith in the middle of sorrow, pulled me back toward that early flame. It reminded me that outward religion without inward intimacy leaves us hollow, and that the Christian life is not primarily a set of activities but a living relationship with a Person who invites us into closeness.
So these threads; distance from my family, the grind of work, the shock of a public death, and the witness of grief turned toward forgiveness, have not been separate items on a checklist but parts of one unfolding story drawing me home to Jesus. The longing I feel for my children has shown me how much I need my first love again; the tiredness of work has reminded me to re-center my identity on being His, not merely a performer of duties; and the public grief and mercy I watched have called me to a faith that is brave enough to grieve deeply and to forgive boldly. In the ache of absence and in the weight of sorrow, I am finding a renewed hunger for intimacy with God; less ritual, more relationship; less doing, more dwelling.
As I close this week, my heart is quieter but clearer. I’m praying for a rekindling of that first love, asking God to make my devotion more than habit and to teach me to carry distance and duty with a surrendered heart. I’m asking for grace to be present with my family in spirit when I cannot be there in person, and for courage to live a faith that looks like mercy even in the hardest moments. Above all, I’m grateful that the Lord uses even the sharpest losses to wake us up… and that He is always ready to lead us back to Himself.
