Grab some tissues...

For todays' blogpost - I now reroute you to another fellow blogger. Here's your plan, sweet reader: Grab a box of tissues.

Make sure you are ready to cry. (and those around you are ready for you to cry)

Enjoy the raw honesty, humanity, hope.

Not only do I really enjoy Donald Miller - but he posted Nella's Story and I now I am following suit.

Click on: Nella's Story.

If you come back here when you're done reading.....here's a few thoughts I had:

Thanks a lot, Amaris, for sending this and making me bawl my eyes out. Ok, seriously, thank you. One of the most piercing ideas that I've had lately that she so keenly wrote about was the death of an idea. The death of what could have been....a perfect little photo inside your head of how is supposed to be, a cute trendy frame around it from Target, all psuedo-vintage and perfectly perfect. You know the kind.

I have struggled and am mourning the death of my ideal family. The perfect amount of time in between children....now fully knowing that Robby and whomever we may have will not share high school together. May sound completely small and trite - but I derive some of my fondest memories from my year as a freshman and my sister as a well-known senior. I have thought about sibling ages for a while and measured out what I would call "the perfect" time frame. And we have missed the Amy Seiffert mark. Again, may be quite small compared to so many other things....but it is one of many small deaths that can make up a large mourning. There is the death of having children in my 20's and recovering quickly  - "bouncing back" physically. The death of being "still young" when they are older. The death of many small things throughout a day as we may or may not conceive again.

What is helpful is many of my deaths need to happen as they focus on me. They focus on my ideal world. My self. My, my, my.  I feel very aware of my fragile frame as a human being lately. Of my "dustness" and how our days on earth are like grass - here one day, gone another. And how, thank God, I am not the center of the universe, like most days I think I am. Eek. We'd be in a heap of trouble.

"Just as a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on those who fear Him. For He himself knows our frame, He is mindful that we are but dust."  - Psalm 103:13-14