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On Tuesday I got a friends request on Facebook from Samuel Harry Gibbens. I know a couple of Samuels, but none of them are Harrys or Gibbenses, I mused. I was about to click “ignore” when I saw that there was a message included and boy did that take me back a few decades!


Sam (as I’d known him back in 1979/80) had been one of our long-term summer campers at Cedar Falls when I was a counselor up there. Because he had been a four-week-in-a-row camper, he became very familiar with so many of the staff members and formed a special bond. He was like everybody’s kid brother. Huge smile, quick wit, and gorgeous blonde curls/waves.


It was such a kick hearing from him (despite the bitter sweet memories of being madly in love with my now former husband.) I went to his Facebook page and realized – wait! I must have confused him with somebody else! This Samuel Harry Gibbens was forty-two years old and no longer appears to have blonde curls. But there was no mistaking those eyes and that smile.


It got me thinking about how we are so often good at freezing people in our memories and making them mere two-dimensional caricatures of who they really are. Our pictures of them don’t keep up with their growth and development.


My adorable niece (or is it ex-niece if I’m divorced from her uncle?), who was the first child of my heart before I had kids of my own, turned out to be a very gifted and talented 30-something mother of a beautiful baby of her own when I located her on FB a few months ago. I had to look at the photos in her profile over and over before I could reconcile that beautiful woman with the little girl I used to play with and give piggy back rids to.


And then there are my daughters, who I’ve had to work very hard to ‘grow’ in my mind over the years of separation, keeping track of them through friends and photos. 

They are now both grown women also. I remember Erin being ever curious, always popular, very affectionate and kind of sassy. 

But who knows how that profile fits her today. As one friend reminded me recently – she was always attached to you (hanging on your arm, piggy-backing, sitting with her feet in your lap for a massage...)


And in their minds, I am apparently frozen as the woman who fought (unsuccessfully) tooth and nail to prevent them from being tormented by an abusive father. 

In their minds, I am the spiteful bitch their father portrayed. They cannot see the pain and sorrow those years caused me too. 

They don’t see me as a multi-dimensional woman who can be loving and funny and endlessly supportive. They just see me as the mean lady. 
I wish they could know who I am.


And I have to also include my older sister here. Although we have been in touch over the years, she still doesn’t ever see me for who I really am. I think that somehow, without realizing it, she’s frozen me as the helpless cry-baby I was as a child.


In a conversation a few years ago, she was surprised to hear I was on antidepressants. Though I’ve struggled with depression all my life and was finally diagnosed in my mid-thirties, this sister I’ve known for 50 years asked, “What do you need those for? You’ve never been depressed. You just cried a lot because you were a cry-baby!” I had to laugh. (And I thank God for antidepressants and the way they have changed my life dramatically and freed me to be the person I am!)


And when I begged my sister several times over the last year to read the book I was working on (which was finally published last week!) and to help me out by giving me her impressions, she refused every time. She said it was because she didn’t want to ruin it for herself. She only wanted to read it when she could read the whole thing.


I finally convinced her, just recently, to read it with all but the last chapter written. She started Saturday night and could not put it down until after 2:00 a.m. Then she read a few more chapters before Mass on Sunday morning and returned straight from church and started reading again and didn’t stop until the book was finished. She said she was floored and that I was really good at writing. To those who know me, that is not a news flash, but to my sister who refuses to see the me that really is, it was a huge shock.


Over the years, she’s also been stunned to find that I recycle, have contributed to the Audubon Society, have done volunteer work, and that I am a very spiritual person (despite not being Catholic.)


My point is that we all manage in life to put labels on others, be they friends, family, students, neighbors, or strangers we pass on the street. 

It’s a natural thing to do. We are taught to do that from a very early age.



That’s the only way our minds can process the massive amount of information that comes our way on a daily basis. 

We categorize things and group them together and label them. Sometimes we have sub-groups or have to reevaluate our categories, but subconsciously, that is what we do every day. It is a useful strategy for making sense of all the data our brain processes on a constant, ongoing basis.


But in some ways it is a curse. It sometimes keeps us from developing a realistic picture of people, or situations or events. We, as people, are always growing and changing. We cannot help but be influenced by the events and people that come into our lives. And it’s only by taking the time to invest in others that we can get to know them. The same is true with God. Not that God is changing, but that He is so multifaceted and infinite that it would take an eternity to know Him fully.


And I think probably the greatest disservice that we do God is putting Him in a box. Maybe a two-dimensional box. We try to label Him. We’ve all been taught over the years that God is love. God is holy. God is omniscient. God is faithful. All of these things are true and are wonderful. But so very finite. I think they limit our God horribly. He is so much infinitely more.


I think back to an email I got a few years back from a former student who is still like family to me. She was very upset and struggling with the thought of going to heaven. She said, “Don’t take me wrong. I want nothing more than to go to heaven. But I love my boyfriend so much and the Bible tells us that in heaven there will be no marriage nor giving in marriage. I don’t want to be somewhere where I can’t love him.”


I sat at the keyboard for quite a while pondering what to say. Finally I wrote to her saying that our minds, as humans, are so limited. God doesn’t say there won’t be love in heaven. What you will have in heaven will not preclude your loving him.


It’s just that as humans, our concept of love is so carnal and selfish. We love our boyfriends or spouses selfishly, and naturally, don’t want there to be any love interests in their lives. We are needy. Face it.


Because of the void that sin places in our hearts, we are forever trying to fill that hole. And we strive to do it with a constricted, human concept of love; to get what (or whom) we can and hold on tight to that love.


But I suggest that the void in ones heart can never be fully filled with human love. And is it not possible that that hole is there for a reason? To remind us that because of sin, life can never be perfect here on earth. We will continue to try to fill that hole with what there is to offer here on earth until we realize that only God's love can completely fill that void.


I then told her a little about the long, lonely path that led me finally to this conclusion. I told her about losing my mother at age nine and then being sent away to boarding school at age 14 and how rejected and lonely I’d been.


How I’d met my ‘long lost’ aunt (my mother’s sister) while I was in college. I even went to visit her across the country in South Carolina. It was love at first sight for both of us as we hit it off immediately. She begged me to move back to South Carolina and live with her and finish my college at Clemson University nearby.


I told her I was already committed to working at summer camp in California that summer, but I promised I would come back in the fall. But she was killed that summer in a car accident. And yet again my heart was broken. I cried for what seemed an eternity.


I met Eddie that summer and wonder if my falling in love with him wasn't an attempt, once again, to fill the terrible hole left by my Aunt Mary's passing.


I contintued, telling my friend how my heart and family had been destroyed with the abandonment by my husband. Then the further rejection and sorrow inflicted by my own daughters. All of these things she’d known, as she and her family were like family to me.


This was followed by the death years later of a man that I loved. Someone I had met years after I’d given up on ever finding love again. Then, like that, in an instant, he was taken from this world in a matter of days after being diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. (see previous blog)


The last thing he said to me before he died was, “Liz, promise me that you won’t close your heart down after I’m gone. Promise me you will love again.”
And I’ve learned in the years since then that one can love again. And that our concept of love is so very different of God’s concept of love. So restricting and limiting.


Loving those I’ve lost – my dad, my aunt, my husband, my daughters and John - does not take away or negate that love. And I have not lost anything.  I can forever be thankful for their love, as human and imperfect as that love was.


God’s love doesn’t cling selfishly. It’s not selfish or possessive. And I am sure that none of us can fathom the dimensions of God’s love, nor the beauty of what He has in store for us.




Liz Carson Rosas
6 November 2009




Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when perfection comes, the imperfect disappears.

When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. 1 Corinthians 4 - 8