Time. It sure is a funny thing.

Time: duration regarded as belonging to the present life as distinct from the life to come or from eternity; finite duration.

(Did you catch that last part? Finite duration?)

We beg for it to slow down. We demand for it to hurry up. We dread the numbers of decades that it labels us. We can feel that it both flew and dragged at the same time.

We mark it, and memorialize it, and listen to it tick by. We marvel at its passage in the faces around us. It makes us both cheer and weep.

It is one thing in our existence over which we have zero control.

In the time it took for you to read what I just wrote you got about half of one minute older.

Facebook got me this morning. It showed me a picture from two years ago. It was a picture of six of us in my family a year ago in a restaurant around a round table celebrating Mother’s Day.
This year, I posted a different picture of seven of us around a round table in a restaurant celebrating Mother’s Day.

One year ago, (Mother’s Day) I was about to send my daughter and her precious family on ahead with their U-Haul to blaze the trail five hundred miles away and set up camp while my husband began the fight for his very life. Our newly sold basement had flooded. Half of our life sat in a moving truck in the driveway. Our power was out and we were dirty and feeling desperate. And completely and utterly overwhelmed.

Last year’s trauma hit each of us hard in its own way. It wasn’t just about a hospital visit. There was so much more happening in our lives as a family. We were stripped down to nothing emotionally and physically, but not spiritually. And in that nightmarish process, we each grieved and fought and surrendered once again to a plan bigger than our own. We’ve all had to grow through that in our own ways as well as collectively.

We mark each of these May days this year. Each one brings a poignant gratefulness with pretty deep reflection. We have changed, after all. We knew before Who held our hand, but we KNOW now. There is no room for doubt.

A page was turned. A new leaf. A reboot.

When people here ask why we picked up and moved here having seen the place once I often find myself saying that we needed a fresh start. My kids have asked me to quit saying that as they’re convinced that folks will think we just got released from prison and are in witness protection. :o)

But it is a fresh start. The last seven years built us brick by brick from all we went through with my parents to all of the church drama, and through all of it we were given our sea legs so that when it was over and Part III had begun, we could stand.

And we do. We stand in awe. Each day is full of awe for a God Who would hold us through it all so we could know Him like this and KNOW the gravity and import of His good gifts like we just couldn’t have known before.

Every day someone here speaks gratefulness aloud.
And contentedness.
And awe.

These next four words will take me several
minutes to utter with my fingers as I type them. They will be ground through metaphorically clenched teeth. They are coming from a still-tender heart.

It was worth it.

It was. He is.