Life Today...

I've been thinking the last few days about how I feel like a totally different person than I was three years ago, or five years ago, or one year ago. I am a new person. I am a Mom now. I am a girl missing her Mom now.

The last two years have taken me to the heights of joys I'd never known and to the depths of griefs I'd never imagined. I've learned to feel suffering. I learned to watch suffering. And now I enter even further into the suffering of others.

A close friend of ours is nearing the end of his battle with cancer. He is about to give his life in the fight. I stagger at this--at seeing it again, at feeling it again, at knowing that people that I love are having to feel the devestation of the beast that is cancer.

I am learning here. I have learned here and from all that has come to me in these whirlwind months. But I can't articulate the lesson. I can't tell you how I'm different. I can't tell you who this new person is. I'm not sure I recognize her. I have to get to know her a little better.

All I know is I step forward into life each day a different person. I'm trying to assimilate the happenings of the last two years into who I am now. I'm trying to learn the steps of a new dance. It's scary, and hard, and leaves me quiet.

But I will continue the journey and I will try to share the story of it as much as I can. Because there is power in the telling of our stories.

Please pray for my friend Bob, as he finishes this journey and begins a new one. Pray for his wife Jennie and their family.

And pray for me as I make sense of who I am now and as I assimilate all that has been into who I am now and what now is.