Staying Open

It was nine months last Saturday.  I meant to post a blog but life and busy-ness and Eric's homework were all vying for my attention too.  We're three quarters of the way through the first year.  In some ways it's still very surreal at moments.  In some ways I can't believe how far we have come.  We've grown a lot, we're closer to one another, we've each changed.  Those awkward, awful weekends of early on have been replaced with a growing normalcy.  Fourteen will never be what it might have been for Eric but I also appreciate greatly the maturity and deepening of his spirit.  And college stuff is in perspective for Emily in ways I don't remember at her age.  So we've grown.

I think I have fallen deeper in love with God than I ever knew I could fall.  It's almost as if God simply stretched open my heart and whispered into it, "you have no idea how I can fill this space if you only stay open to Me."  And that's my biggest take-away in life thus far...stay open.  Stay open even when you think you already have a pretty good idea about things, stay open when it looks scary or filled with hurt, stay open at all costs because Grace enters the open doors in life far faster than closed ones, into which Grace must push and knock repeatedly. 

A week from today would have been our twenty-fourth wedding anniversary, five days later is Christmas and it is into that reality that I find myself yearning to stay open.  Leaning in to Grace, realizing that God is so much bigger than I can imagine, that God has my children in His care far more tangibly than I can myself and surrendering them in their tender years and their grief to Him.  Parenting is far more about praying than anything, not for God to DO something as much as for God to remind me they are His more than they are mine, something mothers work a little harder to accept at times, I think.  Still, there is a freedom in that acceptance.

And so we stay open, as individuals, as a family...and God just floods the space.

Grace for your journey,
Leigh