Every Reason

I am gazing through my office window looking over the treetops to the other side of the cold creek that lies who-knows-how-far below my house at the bottom of a rocky cliff.  Remnants of snow lay on the ground and blasts of cold air are trying to push the cedars to their breaking point.  My wind chimes have not rested all morning.  Birds are pecking at the hard ground looking for anything to satisfy their hunger.  It's the kind of day that implores you to stop working and curl up under a blanket on the couch with a mug of hot cocoa.  I'm trying to resist the appeal...

But even in the middle of this bleak season, nature knows that it will not remain frozen with no hope.  The birds know it.  The trees know it.  The rocks know it.  

Something different is just over the horizon.  The snow will melt.  The cold wind will be traded for summer breezes.  The solid earth will soften and offer up flowers and all things green and colorful.       

For I am about to do something new.  See, I have already begun!  Do you not see it?  I will make a pathway through the wilderness.  I will create rivers in the dry wasteland.  Isaiah 43:19

You are every reason for every hope that we have.  Every dream.  Every season of joy.  Every light in the darkness.  Your Glory fills the sky...

Keep Moving Forward...

Do you ever feel the need to just keep moving forward?  Driven by a fear of standing still?  Worried you might turn back into the person you were yesterday - the person that inhaled raw cookie dough straight from the fridge?  With a spoon?

Me, too.  I just needed to write.

And share this pic.

No, the chocolate smudged on her face is not cookie dough.  It's from a cupcake.  And, given the fact that she never really ate food via her mouth, she was not pleased that a cupcake was forced smudged onto her pinkish-blue pursed lips (and, for the record, I didn't do it).  And that dislike of chocolate is one of the few things we did not have in common.   Although, in her defense, she never really got to develop a taste for good food.  Wonder what she's enjoying now?

I also realized today that I used to think that if I ate a piece of bread and chose to eat the crust along with it (which was a hard decision when I was a kid) that I was eating the "healthy" part of the bread.  Like eating the peel of an apple has actual additional nutrition that the flesh lacks, I thought the crust on a loaf of bread had vitamins and minerals that the middle of the bread did not.  Until I was making Eliana a peanut butter and honey sandwich today, and realized that the crust I was cutting off was in reality just the outside of a loaf of bread that had taken on some additional browning in the baking process.  Why are we so concerned that our kids will never eat the crust?  Am I the only one who had this strange idea about the bread dough that just happened to be on the outside and got all nice and brown?

Just some random thoughts to send your way...

One Word

Sixty seconds never went by without a machine beeping.  It was usually signaling that her oxygen levels had dropped below the parameter set on the machine.  Respiratory therapists would come and do their treatment on her, which was similar to when a massage therapist performs a percussion-type regimen on your back.  She never found her "massage" quite as relaxing as I do.  Her oxygen levels would improve if I held her up to my chest with her face squished against my collarbone.  Then I could smell her head.  You know the smell of a baby's head - it can't be described by or compared to anything else on earth...other than a baby's sweet, head smell.  I would hold her on my chest for hours.  I wouldn't be able to feel my legs since they were being sandwiched between her and a hard, wooden rocking chair.  She slept.  I cherished.  Soon we would be interrupted by doctor's rounds, a dirty diaper, or meds that needed to be given.  I remember thinking that only one word described how I felt at that moment - lucky.  The luckiest girl in the world to be holding this Glory.

I haven't used the word lucky to describe anything relating to my world since those days in the CVICU rocking chair...

Until now.

And blessed be his glorious name for ever: and let the whole earth be filled with his Glory...
Psalms 72:19