Out of the Ashes

Some one made a comment about the picture I have on my blog header, that she was expecting a flower to pop up amidst all those broken and discarded flower pots. Yesterday I found this sunflower growing in the ashes and rubbish in the fire pit container in my back yard!

I also want to quote some things I read in the "One Year Book of Hope". "The value of a life is not determined by how long a person lives or by how much that person contributes. Every life is valuable because God himself gives life and breath. He is not only the source of life; he is also the source of satisfaction and meaning in life."

"This life is not all there is! This life is just a rehearsal for our real life, our forever life in the presence of God."

"He is the God who made the world and everything in it. Since he is the Lord of heaven and earth, he doesn't live in man-made temples, and human hands can't serve his needs - for he has no needs. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need there is. His purpose in all of this is that the nations should seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him - though he is never far from any one of us. For in him we live and move and exist." - Acts 17:24-25, 27-28

Brokenness

I don't really have much to say as I'm thinking so much of a year ago when Renee found out that the leukemia had come back.

But we must somehow accept that there are no answers and still believe that God loves us.

It's Monday and It's Raining

Those two things aren't that bad, but having my face feeling all numb and having spent one and a half hours in the dentist chair isn't making me feel like a very happy camper right now. In a few hours it will be better. I suppose we should be thankful for dentists. If we did not get our teeth put in order, we would be going around with half of them missing. That would not be so good!

My cat is snuggling up and trying to interfere with what I'm doing.

We had a good day yesterday. We had an early Thanksgiving. Alayna and Justin each brought a friend, so we had six at the table for lunch. We had Kara on the speaker phone, so she could join us for a bit of our conversation.

After lunch we spent some time looking at photo albums of the growing up years. We had a good time of remembering family trips and outings or the kids just being silly or whatever the occasion was that needed to be photographed. Lots of good memories.

A New Day

In the book by C. S. Lewis that I mentioned yesterday, he says grief feels like fear, like suspense or like waiting, just hanging about waiting for something to happen. "Grief is like a bomber circling round and dropping its bombs each time the circle brings it overhead." "The mind always has some power of evasion. At worst, the unbearable thought only comes back and back, but the physical pain can be absolutely continuous." The pain and struggles Renee had to go through are way worse than what I'm going through.


Lewis says a mother has to deal with the fact that the maternal happiness of mothering her child has to be written off when the child dies, and that is what makes it so awfully painful. I have to hang on to my hope that some day I will get to heaven to 'glorify God and enjoy Him forever' where there will be no more tears.

Something that I read today in the grief/share workbook is that tears are God's gift to us to express the extent of our loss and not a sign of weakness or a lack of faith.

I'm thankful for the three children that I can still mother, to the extent that adult children need mothering. Right after I wrote that sentence one of my precious daughters called me for some advise. That felt so good.